Sony recently unveiled the PlayStation 5 and of course we’ve had the specs for quite a while now. But there’s only one thing that’s still a mystery: the console’s price. While we don’t have an official price for you today, we do have a PC equivalent of the PlayStation 5. And with that, even the most die hard PC enthusiasts may want to reconsider their stance. Here’s what a PlayStation 5 would cost, if you built a gaming PC with similar specs.
PlayStation 5 re-imagined as a gaming PC
For this conversion we chose individual PC parts that came closest to the announced PS5 specs. We used a wonderful tool called PC Part Picker and it’s integrated lowest price-finder to get some good deals on the parts. But of course, we are comparing apples to oranges a bit as Sony (and Microsoft) buy highly specific components in bulk or have them manufactured themselves. We are using consumer-grade hardware.
Additionally, some PlayStation 5 specs are not conventional in PC builds. For example, you won’t find any accessible PC graphics card that has 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Best you could do is 8GB. So yeah, we created an approximation of de PlayStation 5’s specs whilst keeping it as close to the expected PS5 price range as possible. I mean, we could feature the Quadro RTX 5000 with 16 GB GDDR6 memory, but that would add more than $2000 to our build, making it redundant in the process.
The build
So this is what we came up with:
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Note that even with just the main gaming PC essentials that the cost is nearly one thousand dollars (retail price). Even if Sony were to be able to buy everything in bulk and assemble it all for half that price, that would still give the PlayStation 5 a $500 price tag, excluding the cost of a DualSense controller, cables, shipping, a launch game, and most importantly profit margins!
Furthermore, veteran PC builders will have noticed that the featured hardware will hardly get you a ticket to gaming city. A PC would require a case, a power supply unit, a bunch of fans (though the Ryzen 7 3700X comes with a pretty solid cooler out of the box), and for the real modern-day gamer, some sweet RGB lighting. In other words, realistically our build would carry a price tag of something along the lines of $1200 to $1500 to actually function.
Our conclusion
In conclusion, we can safely say that the next generation of consoles will pack a huge punch. It seems that both Sony and Microsoft have managed to create a system that – at least on paper – equals a pretty beefy gaming PC. Going off of rumors and past prices, they will deliver that for a very decent price! With what we know, our best guess is in the $500-$700 range. As for the actual PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X prices, we’ll have to wait for the official respective announcements. Until then, what do you think the price will be? Let us know in the comments below or join us over at Facebook!