As I began to form this site, and drew plans to start an online presence, some thoughts began to come to my mind.
I've been a long time fan of YouTube channels such as LinusTechTips. BitWit (formerly Awesomesauce Network), Paul's Hardware, Green Ham Gamiing, Tech Yes City, and a few more that escape me at the moment. They all have one thing in common, the PC gaming and enthusiast community. One of the biggest back and forth topics that seems to be always at the top is PC vs Console. And at the top of this argument usually sits the topic of cost. The argument is commonly made that Consoles are cheaper when there is mounting evidence to the contrary. I'm not saying that consoles are bad, I grew up playing PS1, PS2, and N64, it is just that the PC is a far superior device.
Consider this, a PS4 for XBone can sell for $300 to $500 depending on the hardware and bundled equipment and then it's another $50 or so to get the "premium" experience for the online services putting the total costs at $350 to $550. Keeping that in mind that brings to mind my early days of PC gaming and system building. In 2008 my parents and family had given me some money so that I could build a PC. I spent around $300 on the following: AMD Athlon X2 5000+, ABIT AM-M2 HD motherboard, Raidmax Aztec case, EVGA 8600GTS graphics card. At the time this was a pretty beefy mid-range system. It blew through all the games that I had at the time at 720p. Games like Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Mercenaries 2, Star Wars Empire at War, Assassins Creed, GTA 4, and more. I used some leftover parts that I had lying around as well, 4GB of generic RAM and a pair of 250GB 7200RPM hard drives. While an 8600GTS and 5000+ X2 probably wouldn't handle modern games anymore but the console equivalents at the time performed worse.
Fast forward to today. The current set of consoles are far more powerful because of the use of custom AMD architecture, which is x86 based. And in this age of much more powerful consoles you'd expect PC gaming to be at a downfall, but it isn't. More and more people are moving to PC gaming.
Here is my take on a cheap "gaming" PC for those who want to try and get into the community. If you can find someone to help you, or if you do some internet research, you can find a lot of older desktops with really decent hardware. Put your price cap at $200 for the desktop in total and shop around. More likely than not your sweet spot will be a fairly modern Core i5 or older Core i7 machine. And if you buy a business class machine it probably came out of an old office which is ideal because it was maintained by an IT staff. Its also ideal because if you get a machine with the COA sticker on it, they probably didn't use it so the license would still be valid. That way you would not have to buy your own license of Windows which saves some money. If you keep your max cap of $200 you can spend about the same on a graphics card. This puts you currently in the price range of 4 of the best 1080p cards: RX470/570, RX480/580 (4GB), GTX 1050/1050Ti, GTX1060 (3GB). All of the aforementioned cards keep you in and around an affordable price-point. They also perform far better than any of the current consoles. Take a look for yourself the benchmarks have been done over and over again with varying levels of hardware and every single time the performance stats always outdo the current selection of consoles. And it brings you in around the same cost of the average console, about $400. I may write an update to this as things change, or I might write more about the specifics.
But as of right now PC > Console.