Xbox Series X vs. gaming PCs: What you need to know

Are you on the hunt for a totally new gaming machine, only interested in gaming, and want as much raw firepower as possible for your money? Then you might want to consider the $500 Xbox Series X that launched on November 10. There’s no way you can even come close to building a Series X-equivalent PC for anywhere near the $500 price tag of Microsoft’s next-generation console. We tried.

But in the battle of Xbox Series X versus gaming PCs, there’s a lot more to consider than just pricing. Let’s dig in.

Xbox Series X vs. gaming PC specs: Microsoft’s killer value

First, the elephant in the room. For the first year or two after they launch, new gaming consoles tend to offer much more bang-for-buck than comparable gaming PCs, and the Xbox Series X is no exception. It probably puts your gaming rig to shame, and for a comparatively paltry $500.

Microsoft’s console is powered by a custom AMD chip with eight “Zen 2” CPU cores and graphics built using Radeon’s new “RDNA 2” GPU architecture. These parts alone would put you well above a $500 total price for an equivalent PC. The Xbox’s CPU is comparable to a lower-clocked, last-gen Ryzen 7 3700X, which costs around $300. Its 40 RDNA 2 graphics compute units come clocked at 1,815MHz.

Turning to GPUs, the RDNA 2-based $580 Radeon RX 6800 graphics card features 60 CUs at the same clock speed, so the Xbox Series X will probably wind up being roughly on a par with something like a step-down Radeon RX 6700. Microsoft’s console performs somewhere in the ballpark of the last-gen RTX 2080, perhaps a little less.

Add in a blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD, and toss in the ability to play Blu-ray discs, and the Xbox Series X’s hardware value proposition utterly destroys an equivalent gaming PC—and that’s even before you start thinking about the costs of cases, motherboards and whatnot. The most affordable PCIe 4.0 SSDs cost $200.

All told, our first attempt at constructing an Xbox Series X-class PC cost around $1,500. Oof. There’s a reason that Microsoft’s next-gen console convinced my colleague Mark Hachman not to invest in a gaming battlestation.

Microsoft

The Xbox Series X (and more affordable, less powerful $300 Xbox Series S) also offer some key features you won’t find with Windows computers. Of particular note, Quick Resume stores the play state of multiple games inside the system’s memory, letting you hop back in almost instantly. You’ll probably never find something comparable on a general-purpose PC.