IS $600 ENOUGH?
WHAT AN ODD TIME to be a gaming enthusiast! With both Project Scorpio and the PS4 Pro dropping, each promising 4K gaming at price points lower than $500, the argument for a budget gaming PC has come under quite a lot of scrutiny. After all, even this machine—specced at 600 greens— is only aimed at 1080p and no more. So, why invest in it as a platform if you’re keen on gaming?
Well, of course, the answer isn’t straightforward. First and foremost is the level of customization available to those on the PC platform. There’s a lot of similarities that can be drawn between a Mac and a console. They’re both very much locked down into specific settings and applications, limiting what you can do on them, and both are designed not to stress the hardware inside in any grand manner. That said, as time has passed and technology has advanced, there’s now little difference between consoles and PCs from an architectural standpoint. Both use X86 as a coding platform, and both have hardware based off the same SKUs. In fact, the newly announced XBox One X has a slightly higher clocked RX 480 as the base of its graphics rendering chip.
If that’s the case, how can they achieve that 4K 30fps “sweet spot” that Sony and Microsoft’s marketeers clamor for? Again, it’s back to that Mac comparison—everything is locked down, and in the console’s case, graphical settings are gimped and optimized to their extremities to achieve that goal.
Turn to the PC, on the other hand, and there’s no limit to what you can do with the platform. Not only when it comes to adjusting graphics to your particular preference, and smashing frame rates well above that console archetype in the process, but also regarding how you use it. Versatility is key. Whether that’s playing flight simulators, RTS games, first-person shooters, or RPGs; using controllers, joysticks, HOTAS setups, or steering wheels; at 1080p, 1440p, 4K, 3440x1440, or with multiple screens; and with unlimited backward compatibility, and a roster of exclusives more far-reaching than any list ever provided by any of those sub-par living-room boxes—it’s not hard to see why the PC as a platform is superior. And we don’t even need to mention everything else you can do on a PC.
All that aside, it all comes back to that value proposition. How much is all that versatility worth? In our case, with this build, potentially less than you think. Of course, the GTX 1050 Ti isn’t the powerhouse of gaming we’d like it to be; although you can successfully achieve 60fps in most 1080p titles with a bit of loving and some tweaking to AA and more, in our testing suite, we failed to hit the mark. And the Pentium G4600 is a fantastic budget offering, but if you’re after rendering or doing any form of extracurricular gaming activities, it falls flat.
What our Kick Ass $600 machine does show, however, is how much extra you get by investing just a touch more cash. We’re constantly harping on about what the sweet spot is for price to performance—in our case, October’s $700 machine wipes the floor with today’s $600 build. In fact, if you were to go a bit higher, and aim for a budget of $900-plus, you could make yourself a fairly sound 1440p gaming rig for just a little extra dough.