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Comment by bhelkey | Hacker News Reader

When buying a gaming console, I imagine folks think more about the upfront cost ($600 for PS5 vs $1,050 for steam machine) as opposed to the total cost of ownership.

The steam machine may be cheaper in the long run once you consider:

* Playing PlayStation games online costs $11/month.

* PlayStation games tend to be more expensive than steam games.

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Steam isn't the Steam machine. If somebody's on a budget a PC you could get for a couple hundred is way more than enough to run nearly all games on Steam; $600 could get you a beast of a machine. I don't really know who the market for the Steam Machine is, because that price is kind of insane. I suppose we'll see how things look in a year or two there.

> $600 could get you a beast of a machine

Where can you get a new gaming "beast of a machine" for $600? In the past you could build a reasonable gaming machine for $600 but parts are drastically more expensive today.

If you go to microcenter and look for gaming PCs, their cheapest option is $800 [1]. PC Part Picker's entry level build is $780 [2].

The only option I found with these constraints is this computer from Walmart with a GPU released in 2017 and a CPU released in 2013 [3] (This is not a recommendation for this listing. Please don't buy it).

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/705867/powerspec-g530-ga...

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/fQscCJ/entry-level-amd-gaming...

[3] https://www.walmart.com/ip/STGAubron-Gaming-PC-Computer-Desk...

In the past you could build a reasonable one for $200-$300. When "we" were growing up - consoles used to offer huge performance at a tremendous discount. For instance the video card in the original XBox was worth significantly more than the entire system's retail cost. But that era ended at the PS4. Consoles since then are sold with midrange hardware, derivative of typical retail hardware, sold for or near profit on day 1. Beyond this fact, their prices tend to stay fairly comparable to launch prices even as the price of hardware plummets. And now a days we've apparently entered the era of their prices going up relative to launch prices lol.

So the most expensive, and important, by far on both accounts part of a decent gaming PC is the video card. A PS5 is around an RX 6700 or a NVidia 2080, and that's being generous. That's a ~$300 card. You then have $300 left for case + mobo + CPU + RAM, which isn't hard. And in reality your CPU doesn't really matter (within reason) because in modern times basically 0 games are CPU limited. It's pretty much always the GPU. Work out the minimum amount you can get the non-GPU parts from, use your remaining budget on the GPU - you'll end up with a great machine for easily under $600.

There's a bunch of subreddits dedicated to this exact topic as well. /buildapcforme could be nice for more specific advice. In general I'd recommend against buying prebuilt systems. The markup they charge is unreasonably high and 'building' a PC in modern times is basically legos for adults, and there's about a million videos on YouTube showing you exactly what to do, step by step.

I linked both prebuilt and do it yourself builds. Neither resulted in a comparable machine to the PS5 for $600.

Again, I think you are missing how much the price of components has increased.

16GB of DDR5 alone costs approximately $200 [1]. I challenge you to find a new case, motherboard, NVMe SSD, and PSU for the remaining $100 in the budget after $200 for ram and after your assumed $300 for a GPU.

[1] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#b=ddr5&Z=16384001,...

Your comment made me go start deep diving US prices, and yeah there's something really odd. I've been abroad for sometime now in Asia, but that doesn't typically matter in these sort of discussions because the market's fairly efficient. But right now go check out prices on Alibaba for DDR5 [1] and compare that to what US retailers are charging. Those prices on Alibaba are not only very real (as I can order local stuff with ballparks around those figures), but it's also where many retailers in the US are going to be sourcing their hardware from.

So I don't really understand what's happening. Prices shouldn't be this high. That should be opening the door to huge arbs even for a drop-shipping middle man. Tariffs, shipping, something else?

[1] - https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/ddr5-ram.html

> $600 could get you a beast of a machine

Maybe if you get in your time machine and go back a few years. Not today though.

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