The Xbox One S is releasing on August 2, 2016, bringing the power of the original Xbox One into a tiny form factor. Releasing at $399 for the 2TB version, this brings the cost of console gaming back up to budget gaming PC range.
Today, we’d like to find out how powerful of a PC we can build for the same price of the Xbox One S. As it turns out, you can build something surprisingly powerful.
Updated January 2017, with new Intel CPUs, new SSDs, and better choices for RAM and HDDs.
At factory clock speeds, the GTX 1060 claims to be equal to last generation’s GTX 980 in performance, while only sipping 120W of power. All of this at a price of $249!
Get ready for the GTX 1080 era. The GIGABYTE GTX 1080 G1 is just one of many GTX 1080 models.
NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 is the most powerful graphics card currently on the market.
A single GTX 1080 is capable of achieving smooth game play on highest settings even at 4K resolution. When two cards are paired in SLI, even the most demanding games hit 60 frames at this resolution.
The flagship of the red team’s new generation of graphics cards, AMD’s RX 480, is finally here. The 480 aims to be a groundbreaking card for the mainstream gamer. With prices of $199 and $229 for the 4GB and 8GB versions respectively, the card is squarely in the mid-range price point, but with significantly more power than previously seen in a card at this price. The card performs just slightly above the GTX 970 or R9 390 — cards that cost $320+ until very recently.
Michael’s battlestation, complete with audio recording gear.
Logical Increments reader Michael recently put together a brand new video editing and gaming behemoth, which he dubbed the TuffBox. It includes newly released high-end components, with the GTX 1080 and Intel i7-6900K taking starring roles.
He wrote up his build story on PCPartPicker and gave us permission to repost on our blog. So, take it away, Michael.
Jay’s battlestation!
We at Logical Increments love helping people build PCs. Many of our team members also love watching professional PC gaming. And now we’ve helped someone from a professional gaming organization build a PC — a video editing PC, to be exact.
All the parts before they became Eric’s new PC.
About 2 months ago, Logical Increments reader Eric decided it was time to build his first PC. He had wanted to build his own gaming PC for years, but he didn’t have the funds until getting his first job out of college. With the job secured, he said he finally felt confident to build a PC for himself after researching online and talking with other Logical Increments readers in the Disqus comments section on our homepage.
TL;DR: We enjoy seeing PCs that our readers build. If Logical Increments helped you build your computer in any way, we want to share your build story on our blog. Email us at contact@logicalincrements.com with your name and some photos of your build, and we’ll be in touch.
A power supply and graphics card await installation into Jim’s Enthoo Primo case.
Until a few months ago, 53-year-old Logical Increments reader Jim had never attempted to build his own PC. He had always purchased pre-built desktops for his design work, but felt like their components were already antiquated by the time he unboxed the PC.
The purpose of this build is to achieve 4K gaming at 60 frames per second (or 1440p gaming at 144 hz) in AAA games, all within a micro-ATX form factor for approximately $2,000.