I never said anything about hardware equivalency. I said performance equivalency for the same price. The cheapest 7850 on newegg is $130. Good luck building the $500 PC I stated with a card that expensive.
I recently did just that for someone simply by reusing their old PSU, MATX case, BD-ROM drive & RAM. (And the other day there was a 7850 for $80 on Ebay (perfect condition) with 7790's going for under $50 on some "quiet" Ebay days). It can be done if you try, especially if you can reuse components or buy 2nd hand.
And as Red Storm just said in post above, there seems to be a persistent false equivalence of PS4 vs total cost of computer - conveniently ignoring the additional $300-$500 the PS4 owner has usually spent on a full-size laptop to do their homework / college dissertation, etc. If you're a teenager who has both a laptop & PS4 in your bedroom, I don't think you can honestly say they've only spent "$500" total on their combined computing + gaming needs. :sneaky: In reality, the "figure you have to beat" varies quite a bit depending on what else they've spent their money on as a PC alternative for applications (laptops, full-size tablets that never leave the house, HTPC, etc), plus whatever existing components can be reused. Many PC's sold in the past couple of years can be upgraded to "gaming capability" with just a GFX card alone.
Edit : And then there's the Newegg reviews : $499 1TB Samsung 840 EVO - "I installed this SSD in my PS4 and it's working fine. Really easy to swap in.", "great over double space my ps4 started with", etc.
$65 Samsung Spinpoint M8 : "PlayStation 4 upgrade", "PS4 Replacement", "Purchased this just for my PS4 since this was perfect for it. Doesn't heat up as much and no lagging. Runs like a champ and actually smoother and faster than stock HD PS4 500gb.", This is an excellent upgrade for the PS4", etc.
So the reality is, many console owners are spending from $65 to $500 on 1TB HDD / SSD upgrades anyway, opening the case with a screwdriver, taking one bit out and putting another bit in - no different to PC users. So that $500 "to beat" target is now $565-1,000. Still excluding the $500 laptop they bought a year before.
Given some recent chronically bad ports, I honestly believe the only thing some of them have "in their minds" is a wide open space...You have to be kidding if you think PC developers don't have performance targets in mind throughout the whole development process for common base configurations (minimum/recommended configurations) at common resolutions.
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