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by kbenson 3363 days ago
> You'll never get the same performance for the same cost on PC.

In a direct from-nothing-to-full-system comparison, sure. But if you've got a desktop already, your costs might just be the Nvidia card, and maybe some more RAM if that's lacking. Newegg has Nvidia 1070 cards that advertise DX12 for $370. It looks like a 1080 will cost about the same as I imagine the Xbox refresh will cost for about 15%-20% more power. By the time this is actually released, a good 6+ months from now, I imagine those prices will probably be much better.

That's not the only thing that matters of course, but there are benefits to updating your general purpose machine, in that you might make use of that extra power in other ways (e.g. extra RAM making the system more performant in general, not just for games).
1 comments
snuxoll 3363 days ago
> But if you've got a desktop already

Killer right here for an increasing percentage of the population. Fewer households even HAVE a desktop PC these days, laptops, tablets and smartphones are the computing devices of choice for many these days.

Even if you HAVE a desktop, there's no reason to assume the power supply can handle a dedicated graphics card if it wasn't shipped with one. Many OEM's like to skimp on power delivery at the price points the majority of consumer desktop PC's are sold at, since a $400 machine has little profit margin in the first place.

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kbenson 3363 days ago
> Killer right here for an increasing percentage of the population.

Sure, but that's why I specified everyone here, as in the typical HN reader. There are plenty of things that don't make sense for the average person but make sense for particular groups. I wouldn't recommend a Raspberry Pi game/set top/server to the average person, but I might to someone here.

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gozur88 3363 days ago
I would have thought most households (in the US, at least) have a PC for taxes and youtube videos.
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ashark 3363 days ago
Youtube videos? Phones. Tablets. Chromecast, Apple TV, game consoles if you want it on the TV.

Taxes? Possibilities: 1) someone else does it, 2) you do it but all on paper, 3) work device (maybe even at home if it's a laptop), 4) something something public library. I don't think tons of people would miss their personal PC bigly come tax time (some would, surely).

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snuxoll 3363 days ago
TurboTax has an iPad app. Also, it works fine in a laptop as well.
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