Hey everyone, longtime console gamer thinking about switching to PC got a few questions
What is the standard price range for a PC and how often do you have to upgrade it??
What other accessories do you need??(virus protection,mouse, keyboard etc)
When you buy games on steam who can you play with?? Xbox gamers? PS4 gamers? Only other PC gamers??
You can get cheaper than the below, but I wouldn't recommend it. These two PCs hit the sweet spot for value, practical performance, and adequate relevance for longevity:
- The most glaring omission from this bestselling unit is the lack of a superfast SSD drive for the operating system, but that's not necessarily critical for gamers, especially since all the other builds in the sub-$1K won't have more than a 256GB SSD, at best, and 120GB-256GB SSD's aren't exactly going to hold massive game libraries in 2017 and going forward. The greatest advantage to SSDs, only if the game is installed on the SSD, is a decrease in load times. This is negligible for some games, significant for most, and HUGE for some (ex. GTA V).
($699) CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme GXIVR8020A4 Desktop Gaming PC (Intel i5-7400 3.0GHz, AMD RX 580 4GB, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB 7200RPM HDD, WiFi, Win 10 Home), Black - VR Ready
- This one has the SSD, but no WiFi, and it sports the more popular NVIDIA GTX 1060 3GB instead of the AMD RX 580 4GB video card. This is the most popular PC video card currently in existence. In terms of power, though, they're practically identical, and the RX 580 has the slightly superior theoretical ceiling which is usually realized after AMD fully refines their drivers for games, who are slower than NVIDIA with this, so they tend to "age" better:
($849) CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme VR GXIVR8060A4 Desktop Gaming PC (Intel i5-7400 3.0GHz, NVIDIA GTX 1060 3GB, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB HDD, 120GB SSD, Win 10 Home) Black
Notes:
- Both of these units are ~2.5x as powerful as the original Xbox One and PS4.
- They are both about 35% more powerful than the PS4 Pro.
- They are not, however, quite as powerful as new Xbox One X (~45% less powerful). To beat that you will have to invest over $1K. The XBX is an incredible hardware value right now.
What would you say the biggest advantage PC gaming over console?? Biggest disadvantage?
That's an enormous question. I'm tempted to Google for a Reddit FAQ to spare me 2000 words. I've written at length about it on here in the past. I'll leave this to the forum.
Is there a good amount of PC gamers? Do you ever have a problem finding matches with popular games?
It depends on the game, but there are huge player pools. The more PC-specific game types have the largest player pools of any games in the world (ex. MOBAs:
League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm, etc).
In fact, I read recently a metric suggesting that
LoL dropped users for the first time, but at its peak earlier this year, it had
110 million active monthly players. That's over 50% larger than the entire player pool of the Playstation Network or Xbox Live Network combined. I'd written about this extensively, recently:
http://forums.sherdog.com/posts/133842755/
FPS shooters probably have a more healthy overall pool on consoles, since that's their niche, but PC mainstays of the genre like
CS:GO see peak
concurrent gamer figures of 500K or better on pretty much any given day. Moving to non-FPS shooters, right now
PUBG is ~4x bigger on PC alone than
Fortnite is on all platforms combined (PC, PS4, XB1, MacOS). It's the biggest gaming phenomenon of 2017, easily.
The key service for PC gamers akin to the PSN or XBL networks is Steam. Only Valve is transparent with this stuff. Everyone else keeps it hidden unless times are good, and they want to brag to potential investors and stockholders.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
I have invested a significant portion of time in the below post for our build thread to help introduce new PC gamers to the PC gaming world (this post isn't about building). I'll update and repost that below in full for everyone to see, but here is the link (Post #3):
http://forums.sherdog.com/posts/129179513/
