Gaming PC or pre owned xbox 360

topcat007

Starting to wonder if it is just better to get a bog standard laptop or desktop , a monitor and pre owned xbox 360 as the console will always be able to play all the games wont it as Microsoft will design them to work on it .. that would all come to under £500

or i am looking at getting a gaming PC at £750 or £550 but not sure yet how much i want to spend .. My only worry here is PC gaming seems a lot more demanding and it always seem you need to keep upgrading bits to get the games at a good quality ?

XBOX 360 also seem to have a massive catalog of games that are dirty cheap ? Does pc have as many games as cheap?

TLDR: Is it better to get a pre owned xbox 360 (maybe even new) or a gaming PC is the decision i need help with ..

El_Torro

Some people will disagree with me but I've always thought console gaming is cheaper than PC gaming. Mainly because you don't need to constantly upgrade the graphics card, memory, etc...

As for which one is "better", that's up to you to decide really. Do you prefer keyboard and mouse over an Xbox controller? Does it bother you that the graphics on your Xbox won't look as nice as a souped up PC?

Personally I used to be an avid PC gamer but that changed a couple of years ago when I bought a 360. I just find it simpler to play the latest games on a console without having to worry if my hardware can handle it. These days the big name PC titles tend to come out on console too. More importantly they tend to be designed with consoles in mind and sadly the PC market is an after thought. It just made me feel that the money I was spending on a gaming PC rig just wasn't worth it any more.

Tropez

The idea that you need to upgrade a PC regularly is a myth perpetuated by console owners and plain old PC elitists who think you simply must have the latest hardware.

The simple fact is that you can easily get four/five years of use out of a gaming PC and that PC doesn't even have to be at the cutting edge of specs when it is built. I built a gaming PC for a friend around four and a half years ago based on an AMD Phenom II 965 CPU and a Radeon 5850 HD (total cost of the system was less than £500) and that system can still function perfectly fine as a gaming PC. The only upgrade it has received was in the past six months when a second hard drive was added.

At this point it won't play all the games at their highest possible graphics settings but it'll still massively outperform an Xbox 360 which suffers framerate issues on some newer titles.

The important thing is being careful about what you buy in the first place. Store bought PCs often include inferior parts - I know someone who bought a Packard Bell branded "performance" desktop PC which suffered a PSU failure in the first 18 months because the included PSU wasn't up to scratch.

For £550 - £750 you could easily acquire a desktop gaming PC that would give you a good length of use. However, you need to know what you're looking for in terms of specs otherwise you'll likely spend money on a system that doesn't have everything you need.

For this reason, you may prefer an Xbox 360 but a decent gaming PC will be in use for much longer.

I have an Xbox 360 and a gaming PC; I get much more use out of the PC. Graphics are better, wider range of control options, loading times are better etc. Although I do use my Xbox for some games, it's basically a glorified media centre now.

topcat007

Tropez wrote: »

The idea that you need to upgrade a PC regularly is a myth perpetuated by console owners and plain old PC elitists who think you simply must have the latest hardware.

The simple fact is that you can easily get four/five years of use out of a gaming PC and that PC doesn't even have to be at the cutting edge of specs when it is built. I built a gaming PC for a friend around four and a half years ago based on an AMD Phenom II 965 CPU and a Radeon 5850 HD (total cost of the system was less than £500) and that system can still function perfectly fine as a gaming PC. The only upgrade it has received was in the past six months when a second hard drive was added.

At this point it won't play all the games at their highest possible graphics settings but it'll still massively outperform an Xbox 360 which suffers framerate issues on some newer titles.

The important thing is being careful about what you buy in the first place. Store bought PCs often include inferior parts - I know someone who bought a Packard Bell branded "performance" desktop PC which suffered a PSU failure in the first 18 months because the included PSU wasn't up to scratch.

For £550 - £750 you could easily acquire a desktop gaming PC that would give you a good length of use. However, you need to know what you're looking for in terms of specs otherwise you'll likely spend money on a system that doesn't have everything you need.

For this reason, you may prefer an Xbox 360 but a decent gaming PC will be in use for much longer.

I have an Xbox 360 and a gaming PC; I get much more use out of the PC. Graphics are better, wider range of control options, loading times are better etc. Although I do use my Xbox for some games, it's basically a glorified media centre now.

Thanks well the gaming PCs i am looking at are custom built from chillblast. I did have a look at the ones in shop and as you say they are terrible and a waste of money

£550 gets me Fx6300 processor and a 270x

£750 gets me a i5 4750k and a 280x

Not sure how long they will last though which is bothering me ..

Any estimates at how long they would last at high settings on games ?

And then when i have to drop it to medium will they still look better then xbox one and PS4?

Thanks very much

Tropez

topcat007 wrote: »

Thanks well the gaming PCs i am looking at are custom built from chillblast. I did have a look at the ones in shop and as you say they are terrible and a waste of money

£550 gets me Fx6300 processor and a 270x

£750 gets me a i5 4750k and a 280x

Not sure how long they will last though which is bothering me ..

Any estimates at how long they would last at high settings on games ?

And then when i have to drop it to medium will they still look better then xbox one and PS4?

Thanks very much

I'm usually a big fan of AMD but in this case it is worth bearing in mind that their R9's are based on 2-year old technology - the R9 280x effectively being a tweaked 7970HD. These aren't bad cards though. They're more than capable of running the latest games on ultra settings, including Tomb Raider, Tress FX and all.

It's difficult to give guarantees as to how long it'll be able to run the latest games at ultra/best settings but it should definitely give you several years of high performance (if not always best performance) and even when you do need to drop performance down, you will likely be able to keep HD resolutions and texture quality and just dial back on anti-aliasing. It should remain ahead of the Xbox One in terms of performance for some time but you do have to be aware of developers who do lazy ports.

The CPU is more than enough. Games still aren't taking advantage of multi-core CPUs very often so an i5 is perfectly fine. You must make sure the system has a minimum of 8Gb RAM as well. I doubt anyone would try and sell a performance PC with 4Gb these days but you never know.

topcat007

Tropez wrote: »

I'm usually a big fan of AMD but in this case it is worth bearing in mind that their R9's are based on 2-year old technology - the R9 280x effectively being a tweaked 7970HD. These aren't bad cards though. They're more than capable of running the latest games on ultra settings, including Tomb Raider, Tress FX and all.

It's difficult to give guarantees as to how long it'll be able to run the latest games at ultra/best settings but it should definitely give you several years of high performance (if not always best performance) and even when you do need to drop performance down, you will likely be able to keep HD resolutions and texture quality and just dial back on anti-aliasing. It should remain ahead of the Xbox One in terms of performance for some time but you do have to be aware of developers who do lazy ports.

The CPU is more than enough. Games still aren't taking advantage of multi-core CPUs very often so an i5 is perfectly fine. You must make sure the system has a minimum of 8Gb RAM as well. I doubt anyone would try and sell a performance PC with 4Gb these days but you never know.

Great info which is very much appreciated!

in your opinion would an extra £200 be money well spend or realistically or would i get away with the cheaper build lasting just as about as long ? I am only really after equivalent to Xbox one graphics if i go this route

Only disadvantage i can see as mentioned previous The xbox one could last 10 years (microsoft will desgin the games for the spec) where as the PC 5 as developers will assume people are running the latest and greatest .

With a PC can i use a controller easily ? as i do mouse work all week at work and want to give my hand a rest

Tropez

topcat007 wrote: »

Great info which is very much appreciated!

in your opinion would an extra £200 be money well spend or realistically or would i get away with the cheaper build lasting just as about as long ? I am only really after equivalent to Xbox one graphics if i go this route

Only disadvantage i can see as mentioned previous The xbox one could last 10 years (microsoft will desgin the games for the spec) where as the PC 5 as developers will assume people are running the latest and greatest .

With a PC can i use a controller easily ? as i do mouse work all week at work and want to give my hand a rest

What I would say is that there isn't a massive difference between the 270x and the 280x, although the 280x is the better card and the i5 is better than the AMD CPU, so performance does favour the i5 setup. It's hard to really measure that performance without seeing the two of them doing the same tasks. If you feel comfortable spending the extra £200 I would do it personally but if your main desire is to match Xbox One graphics then the cheaper option will do the trick as it should already outperform an Xbox One.

One thing to consider with PC gaming is that generally the savings are on the games. New games at release are more expensive on consoles by £5-£10 in general (Activision games are a general exception) and when the Steam sales roll around several times per year the cost of PC gaming significantly decreases temporarily due to the discounts available. There is, of course, no significant pre-owned market to speak of, however.

Yes, the PC probably won't last as long as the Xbox One but its arguable whether a Xbox One or PS4 device will last the full ten years themselves. Also, with the Steambox starting to become a reality there's the possibility that developers will support older hardware for longer. And as I say, the system I built for a friend featured much more inferior hardware than either of the two systems you're looking at and they still can play most games on high to ultra settings. The only ones they have problems with are notoriously bad ports such as GTAIV so that's made almost the five year mark and they haven't had to drop to medium yet (though I will concede the system was built half-way through a console cycle when console capabilities had been reached).

The Xbox One and PS4 are using AMD hardware so the chances are that games will be better optimised for AMD tech, which is what the those two graphics cards you mention are, and this may be small boon over the long-term.

Obviously, the developers will push the boundaries but if you have a system that outperforms a console now it should still be able to play console games at equivalent levels for a long time because the devs have to make their games perform on static hardware formulas.

As for controllers, Xbox 360 controllers, both wired and wireless are natively supported in Windows and I would imagine Xbox One controllers will be as well. If you want a wireless controller you need to pick up an extra piece of kit (Windows wireless receiver or something). I believe that PS3 controllers can be supported but I've not used one myself.

Nilrem

Tropez's advice is pretty much spot on.

Personally if given the choice between a PC or console I'd go console, as whilst PC's are a little more upfront, they do a lot more and can be repaired if they break, also the games are usually a lot cheaper.


My last PC was mid range and apart from a videocard replacement (fan died), lasted something close to five years and still played most of the new games at Console or better resolutions, and I was picking up the games often much cheaper than the console versions.

One tip if anyone goes PC, is to keep an eye on the likes of the humble bundle etc, as you can often get loads of games fairly cheap (or very cheap), which alongside the Steam offers/sales, and the various CD key stores means you rarely if ever have to pay full RRP, I think the most I've paid for a game was about £30 for Simcity (EA game on Origin), whilst on average I've been spending under a tenner on Steam games, including relatively new releases such as Tomb Raider, Borderlands 2 etc.

If you've got an Xbox 360 wireless controller you can buy a compatible receiver from various places for £5-10 which will let it work in windows* (you may need to tell the device manager to use the driver manually, but that's not a problem).



*I picked up an official "wireless controller for windows" pack cheap, but the receiver bust (apparently common, as they've got a dodgy internal fuse), so tried the unofficial receiver which has lasted a good couple of years.

PenguinJim

If you're not overlocking, you don't need the 'K' on that i5 CPU. A basic £125 i5 will provide similar performance for a few years. Then again, £165 gets you the i5-4670K (note that you'll need a Z87 motherboard for overclocking instead of the H87 motherboard). You don't need more than an i5-4670K. In five years just add 1GHz to the clockspeed.

You might save yourself a lot of hassle by getting a NVidia card instead of AMD. I wouldn't reject an AMD card myself, but I don't mind fixing tech problems. For friends and family I recommend the superior overall experience of Nvidia (better drivers, quieter and cooler, fewer incompatibilities and game problems, etc). As the GTX 760 has stubbornly refused to drop to a bargain price, I suggest the much-faster GTX 770, which has dropped to £215 plenty of times recently.

You should be able to put together an i5-4670K / GTX 770 build for £600 or less, and it should be stupidly fast for years. If you want to stretch to £650, a £50 SSD will make the whole Windows experience far more pleasant - I'd recommend it.

TherealMandM

having just upgraded my 4 year old pc (by choice was still running everything on 1080p on ultra) I would never go back to consoles they are to far behind on graphics.
I am now playing at 1440p on 120hz screen (if you have experienced you would never go back) with plans for UHD when monitors become cheaper and faster. As 4k TV's/monitors will begin becoming the norm through the next 2 years and PC's will be able to take advantage of this for gaming. the PS4 and XB1 are going to be looking pretty tired still running 1080p for the next 8years+. As a pc user I would stick to the pc, but I think the steam machine might just take the console market by storm especially as its upgradable, hardware for UHD will drop in price as it always does.
If you think the 360 and ps3 came out around the time hdtv's were mainstream, now the ps4 and xb1 are still using hdtvs at a time when UHD is going to become mainstream

TherealMandM

PenguinJim wrote: »

You might save yourself a lot of hassle by getting a NVidia card instead of AMD. I wouldn't reject an AMD card myself, but I don't mind fixing tech problems.

Funny I had this discussion on a guild forum just a few days ago, He and his friend both were using ATI Cards and were having problems and was switching to nvidia at the same time as 3 others were using nvidia (2 of which were GTX 770) and having problems and going to ATI.

Personally for me I had the HD6970 with a stock cooler for nearly 3 years and not a single problem and I have just switched to the r9 290x twin frozr with no problems in any games.
Also with the implementation of mantle ATI shouldn't be sniffed at