PC Consoles

[Baryonyx]

Has anyone had experience with the PC Console machines, things like the Syber Vapor series and that sort of thing? They claim to offer straightforward PC gaming through your television with the sort of ease of use not normally associated with PC gaming. The costs are considerable, but not when you consider the price of custom building a high end gaming PC. The Vapor X is stratospherically priced, but the Vapor I seems a lot more reasonable.

Are they any good though? The idea of playing new MMO's and Arma on my television is nice, but what sort of shelf life do these machines have? I presume with them being a sealed unit, they can't be upgraded like a traditional PC? Are they really as good as they say? Little things irk me, like the pads, which look pretty hokey on a £600 machine!

[P-Jay]

That pad is a Logitech unit, it's meant to be okay - the Xbox one controller is better but not everyone gets on with it, I'm told you can use the PS4/4 controller which is my preferred controller but it's bloody impossible to do.

As for the PC console, it's not for me - I could buy a decent i5 desktop and a GTX 750ti GPU for that. Having just this week made the switch from PS3 to PC I don't see the point of one of these units - take the time to learn about processors, graphics cards and whatnot and it's easy enough - it's pretty much plug and play.

Tbh a lot of people really get into the whole thing and will spend a huge amount of time and money to build amazing machines that can extract every last drop of detail from a game, but it's s horrible game of diminishing returns really, you can get 95% of the performance for a lot less money and just bolt the thing together without over clocking, water cooling and whatever else.

[Meoricin]

The fact they're selling it with what looks an awful lot like one of those £5 chinese mini-keyboards would make me question the quality of the rest of the package, tbh.

...then again, just checked - most of the components it says they use look decent (Silverstone PSUs etc suggest they know what they're doing), and they offer these to a rather high performance point.

No doubt you pay for the luxury of having them assemble for you, and I'd be amazed if they're not underclocking to keep the heat down given some of the component mixes they're cramming into that case, but they look ok as far as pre-builds go.

[BrownBottle]

The £600 one with an i3 cpu and a bottom of the range GPU combined with a cheap power supply isn't going to cut it I'm afraid.

The £1000 Vapor K's components are more in line with a mid end PC although I can't tell what motherboard it has, I reckon you could build a PC using the same components plus using a good quality motherboard and power supply and save maybe £150, in fact I think you could actually get away with a slightly less powerful GPU if you wanted to save a bit more.

If sticking it under your TV like a console is important to you (it was to me) then you can buy a case like the Siverstone one I have http://www.amazon.co.uk/Silverstone-SST-GD09B-Gran...

However, taking into account you don't need to build it plus the neat packaging (it looks more compact and attractive than my case) and it says it's upgradable that extra £150 doesn't sound like too much of a raw deal to me so I can see the appeal.

[Baryonyx]

[quote=P-Jay
As for the PC console, it's not for me - I could buy a decent i5 desktop and a GTX 750ti GPU for that. Having just this week made the switch from PS3 to PC I don't see the point of one of these units - take the time to learn about processors, graphics cards and whatnot and it's easy enough - it's pretty much plug and play.

[/quote]


For me, it'd suit in that I've already taken over the front room quite unfairly. I have my Xbox One and PS4 in front of the TV, my laptop with speakers on the table and my guitar and amp in the other corner. Okay, so it's a big room but I don't really want to set up an ungainly looking tower PC just for gaming. This sort of thing, coupled with my TV, would be ace. But is it really as flexible as a PC for gaming? I presume you could plug a keyboard in, get a little granny table set up next to your chair for the mouse, and just get on with it? Be playing ARMA and whatever MMO is popular these days by tea time?

[BrownBottle]

Meoricin said:

No doubt you pay for the luxury of having them assemble for you, and I'd be amazed if they're not underclocking to keep the heat down given some of the component mixes they're cramming into that case, but they look ok as far as pre-builds go.

I must say I was surprised with the size of the case and wondered how they managed cooling particularly with the top end version.

[3sixty]

As above seems expensive compared to just buying an ITX case and doing it yourself

As an alternative, build a proper size desktop in a room and stream your games to a small low end box in living room with Steam over wifi?

[P-Jay]

Baryonyx said:

[quote=P-Jay
As for the PC console, it's not for me - I could buy a decent i5 desktop and a GTX 750ti GPU for that. Having just this week made the switch from PS3 to PC I don't see the point of one of these units - take the time to learn about processors, graphics cards and whatnot and it's easy enough - it's pretty much plug and play.



For me, it'd suit in that I've already taken over the front room quite unfairly. I have my Xbox One and PS4 in front of the TV, my laptop with speakers on the table and my guitar and amp in the other corner. Okay, so it's a big room but I don't really want to set up an ungainly looking tower PC just for gaming. This sort of thing, coupled with my TV, would be ace. But is it really as flexible as a PC for gaming? I presume you could plug a keyboard in, get a little granny table set up next to your chair for the mouse, and just get on with it? Be playing ARMA and whatever MMO is popular these days by tea time?

I've used a very small, very neat looking SFF HP desktop - it'll take 32GB of RAM, it has a decent spec i5 processor and will take a SFF GTX 750Ti - no it doesn't have a massive cooling fan or 1.21 gigawatt PSU but it will run games beautifully. It doesn't sound like a helicopter taking off either.

I used it because frankly it was sitting around the office looking lost and lonely - but if I had to buy one I'd go for something like this

http://www.misco.co.uk/product/2468154/Fujitsu-ESP...

We've installed hundreds of these and others like it - it will 'only' take 16GB of RAM, but that's overkill usually, add maybe £90 for a couple of 8GB RAM cards, £120 for a SFF GPU and you're about the £600 mark.

It's a lot of 'sitting room' compliant than a gaming tower, doesn't make nearly as much noise and will tuck in the same sort of spaces a DVD player would.

They're well made an come in loads of configurations, I'm sure you could find one with a Home OS and 3 year warranty for about the same price as the one above.

[S3_Graham]

Let me know if you get ARMA.... Few of us play it.... Also be wary of arma 2, it's utterly brilliant but people are slowly migrating to arma3 now overpoch has been released. I've noticed a lot of new players on the CCG server I play on, plus less and less 'regulars'

[Asterix]

Also, to play Arma 3 to any decent level setting you need a reasonably hi-spec set up as it's not brilliantly optimised imo.

Awesome game though, especially with TrackIR

Another fear for me would be cooling - it doesn't look like there's much room for decent airflow and playing with stuff working hard creates a lot of heat - always had the same thoughts with gaming laptops.

[SirSquidalot]

I've just gone from console gaming to building my own PC, these console designed pc's are very expensive for what they are. In my case i was looking about £200 more for a console styled pc than my build!

[8bit]

These things are expensive because the hardware vendors don't get any cut of the revenue generated by the games. Sony get a fee for each PS3/PS4 game sold and Microsoft get a cut of the sale price of each XBox 360/One game. This enables Sony and Microsoft to sell their consoles at a loss, at least initially until economies of scale make hardware production cheaper than the unit cost of the hardware.

If they weren't seeing any of the income from the games, the hardware would be considerably more expensive; probably more than the cost of these PC consoles because they use bespoke components in a lot of cases.

But the cost a PC game tends to be significantly lower than the same title on console, principally because there's no hardware vendor sticking their cut on top. So if you buy and play a lot of games and you know the ones you want are all coming out on PC, then you'd potentially save a bit of money in the long run with one of these by paying less for games.

You can also upgrade some of the components in one of these consoles as you see fit, rather than having to upgrade the whole thing.

TL;DR - it's not as clear cut as "this is more expensive than a PS4/XBone", the games are cheaper than the console versions.

[Meoricin]

8bit said:

TL;DR - it's not as clear cut as "this is more expensive than a PS4/XBone", the games are cheaper than the console versions.

It is as clear cut as "this is more expensive than a small home-built PC" though.

[8bit]

Meoricin said:

It is as clear cut as "this is more expensive than a small home-built PC" though.

Yes, but not everyone has the skills to build a PC.

[8bit]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Yes, assembling the thing is fairly straightforward nowadays, but not everyone will understand how to go about selecting the component parts. For most of us on this thread (indeed on this forum) we can probably do this stuff in our sleep but having enough understanding of how a computer works, what the components do etc. is still in the realms of a minority. This is only getting more pronounced now that devices like tablets and smart phones have become the default personal computing devices, there's even less impetus on "regular users" to understand how the device works.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I think there's a compelling case for off-the-shelf console PCs, much less that I'm in the market for one personally, far from it. I was just trying to illustrate why these are more expensive than mainstream consoles. The reason they're more expensive than home-built PCs is simple; they're coming from small companies who have to turn a profit of their own and know they won't sell in the same sort of volumes as XBone or PS4 do.

[Asterix]

Perhaps have a look at some of the Overclockers builds they do.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?gro...

[Squirrelofwoe]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

I'd always been put off by the perceived complexities of it, but after watching the video below I figured it really couldn't be that difficult and so had a go myself when it came to rebuilding my PC back in December. I found it every bit as straightforward as this video makes it look.

Build is from around 8.20 to 20.00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WQxr59KRto

From start to being gaming ready, mine took around 7 hours total - 4 of which was downloading Windows updates...

And to give an example of my level of 'tech-xpertise', the only bit that really stumped me was discovering that there was no longer a long/round port to plug my 8 year old monitor into- leading me to spend half an hour reading about VGA, DVI, HDMI, Display port etc, and a trip to PC world for an over-priced adapter cable.