Building A PS5-Level Gaming PC For Current Street Pricing: Is It Possible?

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 28 November 2021, 05:11 pm

PS5 restock trackers are harder at work than they've probably ever been, especially with the holiday season just around the corner. And that's because people are trying their best to avoid the exorbitant resale prices of Sony's console on the open market.

(Photo : Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images via Getty Images)
Living room with a Sony PlayStation 5 home video game console and DualSense controller alongside a television, taken on Novemebr 3, 2020.

But what if there was an alternative?

What if you can get roughly similar gaming performance in something like a gaming PC without having to pay PS5 resale prices? In this article, we're going to explore the possibility.

OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER: the prices you see in this article are not constant and are due to change over time without prior notice. It is also impossible to completely match PlayStation 5 hardware with PC hardware, so some parts could only be close approximates of originals.

Official PS5 Specs

Before starting to spec out a PlayStation 5-level gaming PC, let's take a look at what Sony put under the hood of their current-gen console, courtesy of Eurogamer:

CPU: 8-core/16-thread AMD Zen 2 CPU at 3.5 GHz
GPU: AMD RDNA 2 graphics chip at 2.23 GHz with 10.3 TFLOPs of performance
RAM: 16GB GDDR6
Storage: 825GB custom SSD (with option for NVMe expansion up to 4 TB, as per Android Central)

There are other hardware specs, but these are the most critical ones to performance if we really want to take Sony's console head-on.

Current Street Pricing

As of this writing, the PS5's price on eBay varies a lot. You can expect to pay as much as $1,100 or more for the disc version, depending on what freebies the console comes with (i.e. free games, a PS Plus subscription, or an extra DualSense controller).

(Photo : Olly Curtis/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
A Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controller, taken on October 29, 2020.

With that, we can set the budget for our gaming PC at roughly $1,100. The budget, however, is flexible. Things can either go over or under the budget depending on the circumstances.

PS5-Level Gaming PC: The Parts

CPU

Sony equipped the PS5 with an 8-core, 16-thread AMD Zen 2 chip clocked at 3.5 GHz. The closest hardware equivalent will be a Ryzen 7 3700X, which can be had for as low as $225 on eBay right now.

GPU

The PS5's GPU is an AMD RDNA 2-based chip with 10.3 TFLOPs of computing performance. RDNA 2 is the same architecture found in the Radeon RX 6000 series. For this choice, we're going with an RX 6600 XT, which can be bought for as low as $640 on eBay.

It is just a tad bit faster than that of the PlayStation 5's GPU at 10.6 TFLOPs, according to TechPowerUp. Still, this is the closest a gaming PC can get to the Sony console's graphical muscle.

Storage

The SSD is the PS5's calling card--even more so than its CPU or GPU, because of just how big of a difference it makes to the overall experience. It uses a custom 825GB internal SSD to do its job.

We're equipping our PC with a 1 TB Western Digital Black SN750 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD, which is $94.99 on Amazon as of this writing. This is the closest thing we can get because the PCIe Gen 4 spec is important if the gaming PC is to match the PS5's snappiness.

Motherboard, Memory, Power Supply, Case

For these last four parts, we're going with the cheapest, good-quality ones out there as of the moment.

Motherboard: ASRock B450M PRO - $59.99 on Newegg
RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2x8GB) 3200 MHz - $48.99 on Newegg
Power supply: Cooler Master MWE Bronze 500W - $60.99 on Newegg
Case: Cougar MX330-G mid-tower case: $46.99 on Amazon

Final Thoughts

The total cost for our entire PS5-level gaming PC build is $1,176.95. It's almost $77 more than the current lowest eBay pricing for Sony's console, but the performance will be largely the same (or at times even better) based on the hardware that's been picked out.

To top things off, the final verdict is this: for the current street pricing of the PlayStation 5, it is possible to build a roughly similar-performing gaming PC. But should the street prices for Sony's console go back down close to its MSRP of $499, that is going to be an extremely powerful gaming machine for the price.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by RJ Pierce