Gaming PCs Surpass New Consoles

By NewsFactor Network | December 7, 2006

The new video game consoles already look pretty wimpy compared with the latest gaming PCs. The Wii? Whatever. The Xbox 360? No match. The PlayStation 3? You can’t find one, anyway.

Featuring water-cooled microprocessors, beefy graphics cards and gigabytes of memory, current high-end gaming PCs are light years ahead of the latest consoles from Microsoft Corp., Nintendo Co. or Sony Corp. However, they come at a hefty price, however.

Together, two new systems I tested cost nearly $16,000 — as much as a new Honda Civic. But a new car can’t run video games, and that’s where the Mach V from boutique computer maker Falcon Northwest ($9,621.83 as tested, including a 30-inch display, wireless mouse and keyboard) and Alienware’s Area-51 7500 ($5,419) excel. These two screamers are among the fastest, most capable machines money can buy for all your video gaming needs.

So what exactly do you get for that much cash? Each system includes fairly similar innards: two gigabytes of memory and an advanced 3-D graphics card from Nvidia Corp. that alone retails for $600 — as much as a high-end PlayStation 3. Perhaps the most significant feature is the new microprocessor from Intel Corp., known as Core 2 Extreme, which acts as the computing brain of each system.

Sporting four tiny processing engines on a single chip instead of just one or two, it means you can play online games like “World of Warcraft” and “work” programs like Microsoft Office without skipping a beat.

The consoles, on the other hand, tend to use customized chips tuned especially for games, and for the most part that’s still the case.

The Xbox 360’s CPU was designed by IBM Corp. and has three cores compared to the four cores found in the Mach V and Area-51 7500. The Wii uses a much less advanced processor also created…

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