For me, PC gaming is simple adding a USD$70 graphics card to my regular PC (HD4670). The HD4670 is roughly as powerful as the GPU of the XBOX 360.

Anyway, there seems to be a general consensus that the XBOX and PC are worlds apart. But actually, the XBOX 360 is basically a cheap but streamlined PC with a cutdown OS. You can approximate it as a X1900 + duo core CPU + shared 512MB.

But note the structure of the processor is different in its execution and structure to traditional CPUs.
( => http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/06/xbox360-2.ars)

when i got my first PC, i graduated highschool and had a $1k budget from parents for a computer for college. with that money, i built a computer now over 2 years old and haven’t had to sink any extra money into it yet. The extra cost of owning a Gaming PC over a regular one has been zero. I still have no problem running new games that come out. And in another year or two when i eventually upgrade my gaming PC, not only will i not have to buy a new monitor, keyboard, or mouse; but i won’t have to buy a case or a psu either; those objects cost me roughly $400 of the $1k i spent on my gaming pc; so it should only cost me $600 when i upgrade.

also, 4 gamers per year is fairly conservative imo… i am a fairly casual gamer compared to a lot of people i know, and i probably get at least 5 games a year. a lot of people get like 10 or more.

There’s also the question of how much gaming would you do on your pc if you primarily gamed on your console? you would probably at the very least play some flash games if not MMO’s. inwhich case, you would most likely also spend money on upgrading your pc occasionally.

Raid 1 is mirroring, it is for live data security. It actually means a quite small performance drop in writes (depending how decent your raid card is, and I am betting this moron was using the mobo raid.) It also wastes half of your physical disc space. Low end servers use raid 1, not gaming rigs.

Only the most expensive and powerful gaming PCs use raid, and that is raid0 (striping, meaning much faster read speeds.) Raid should not be in this comparison at all, as any gaming rig expensive enough to include raid will be so far beyond the Xbox360′s performance that it would be like comparing a push bike with a saturn 5 rocket.

The rest of this comparison is balls too, but the raid part made me chuckle.

It goes like this:

100 dollar today is just worth 100 dollar.
if a bank gives you 2% interest per year and you put the 100 dollar in the bank you will have 100 dollar plus 2 dollar (2% on the 100) which adds up to 102 dollar

That’s what the NPV method is about. A 25% interest rate or whatever it was is a ridiculous high amount! If not you should definitely tell which bank or shares you have your money on

TAX RIGHT OFF MWHAHAHA

1: work center
2: media center
3: you can connect it to multiple tv’s and run video off you pc unto them
4: gaming
5: education needs
6: internet browsing
7: data storage
….i can go on forever

The computer I built from scratch has a 6 month old video card, core 2 duo, 3.5 gig ram, and alot of other good stuff. It costed me less then 600 dollars, I can run just about ANY game at 60 frames/sec. The ONLY game that i cant run so well is Crysis. And the ONLY console game that has better graphics then I have on my PC is Gran Turismo 5. The only game I have that comes close to GT5 is GRID (graphic wise). But if GT5 was on PC it would be cool. And im running on a card better then the consoles have, but its old, Imagine the quality with a 4870 x2, the fastest card on the market. (but thats a luxary to upgrade, not a required expense)