I am planning on either building or buying a new gaming system; either PC or Xbox 360. As you will know if you have been looking at the thread I started called [post=135731]PC Building Advice[/post], building a PC has been proven to me to be a difficult and often fruitless task. Choosing the correct parts and assembling them can be rather difficult, it can be very expensive, there are few games which fully take advantage of the hardware, and PC hardware quickly becomes obsolete because of the rapidly changing market, although there are many good games for the PC. The Xbox 360, however, doesn't require assembly, it is cheap compared to a good PC, there are many games which take advantage of its graphical prowess, and it is unlikely to become obsolete any time soon simply because of the number of people who own them, although so far there aren't many good games for it. So my question to you is this; which is best to get, a gaming PC (one using current technology; ignoring the new processors/graphics cards that will come out later this year) or an Xbox 360? Edit: This may be in the wrong category; if so, please move it.
In terms of power the 360, and i'm pretty sure that's a fact, last time I checked, it's graphics card has a more powerfull GPU then any card that's available on the consumer market for pcs, only downfall I can think of is it's ram, which doesn't have such a big impact as it would on a pc due to the games being streamed off of the dvds. And for games, it really depends, if your pc is capable of playing older games which are classic, i'de recommend getting the 360, since you can play all the classics on your current pc, and any next-gen games on the 360. But if your pc can't play any games at all, it's really a tough choice.
PC games stream from DVDs too (or better yet, from hard drive). RAM isn't such an issue for consoles because they generally aren't running an operating system like Windows, among other things.
Well from what I know a lot of pc games store an entire level (or most of one) in the ram when your loading before you start playing, but with consoles games (until now) storing entire levels in the ram wasn't possible, so a lot of devs would just create a engine capable of streaming the levels as you play them, from the disc, instead of just loading the entire thing into the ram beforehand, so less ram was would be needed to play the games.
Both. Its apples to oranges. I still love my 400sc with 2 gigs of ram and a 256 8x AGP. It has a 250 gig HD and a slower p4 but a 800 FSB. I put that computer together about a year and a half ago for a bit over a grand and it still puts a lot of machines to shame. Was playing Half Life 2 on it for the 900th time just last night. Nothing like a KB and mouse for certain games. 360 is great for just turning on and gaming, if you have friends over none of them want to hover around a PC monitor, plus most PC controllers suck. If you love gaming you must have both.
