Gaming PC versus PlayStation 4 Pro price comparison

The PlayStation 4 Pro recently went on sale in South Africa, and many gamers are wondering whether the new console presents good value for money.

We compared the pricing and specifications of the PlayStation 4 Pro to an equivalent gaming PC in order to determine which is the better option for gamers on a budget.

Specifications and Hardware

The PlayStation 4 runs on x86 microarchitecture, meaning its hardware is functionally similar to that of modern PCs.

While this makes its easier to compare specifications between the platforms, there are still a number of major differences between a PlayStation 4 console and a gaming PC.

The PlayStation 4’s main hardware component is a custom-built system-on-chip, meaning its GPU and CPU are essentially a single unit.

This is more streamlined and cost-effective than discrete components found in a gaming PC, but removes the ability to upgrade and modify individual parts.

The PlayStation 4 Pro also features 8GB of GDDR5 memory, but this resource is shared over the entire system – limiting the maximum memory single programs can use.

The specifications of the PlayStation 4 Pro are below.

Equivalent PC

The PlayStation 4 Pro uses an 8-core AMD Jaguar processor and a Polaris-powered graphics processor, so we selected AMD components with processing power equal to or greater than that of the PS4 Pro.

The graphics processor performance of the PS4’s Polaris GPU is rated at 4.2 TFLOPS, which is comfortably surpassed by AMD’s Radeon RX 470 graphics card and its 4.9 TFLOP floating point performance rating.

The PlayStation 4’s Jaguar CPU has a clock speed of 2.1GHz. Our chosen PC equivalent, the AMD FX-8300 desktop processor, features eight physical cores and a clock speed of 3.3GHz, making it more than adequate for gaming.

Below is the pricing of our PlayStation 4 Pro-equivalent PC.

The price of a gaming PC comparable in power to the PS4 Pro is R9,058, over R2,000 more than the console.

The price of the equivalent gaming PC also does not include the cost of an operating system – although free software, such as SteamOS, is available.

While the PlayStation 4 Pro is cheaper than a gaming PC, newer games are generally more expensive on the console and users are required to pay a subscription to play online with PSN.

PC gamers can play online without any recurring costs.

This article first appeared on MyBroadband and is republished with permission.

Now read: Nintendo Switch – South African pricing and launch date