fair enough.

but i don't want to spend $750 to play games and type, its completly irrellavent, we are talking about gaming, and i can't game on my laptop, which is what i bought for school for $300, +$450 for the gaming console and its win. i don't need an expensive computer, if i keep them seperate, i'll NEVER really need to upgrade my computer for internet/word and some other stupid things. so i fi want ot game, spending $450 when the console first comes out, is better then spending $750 on a pc to keep up with it. I'll have my laptop so i don't need something to type on.savagetwinkie

Ah, of course, that's it. I am biased towards my own demogrphic and forget many gamers are still not of career age. Well, this current economy throws all bets off, but gods willing, in not too long college graduates will again have a good shot at real careers, and for that one inevitably needs a decent PC. Or almost inevitably -- I am being white-collar-centrish; have to remember not to do that; anyway, if lucky and aiming for an Information-Age-ish sort of career, in future you may well have to buy a new PC despite your current wishes; but that is no hard luck; mine cost a one-time $750 and returns me more than $50,000 per year ongoing, which is an ROI I will go for anytime. (Especially because I could deduct nearly the whole price from my taxes. And the Internet connection, too; as I do do much more work on my PC than gaming -- between the 2, I don't actually have the time to miss whatever great console games I am missing.) So in any case you may find you have a PC that you can game on despite yourself, and then you will see how well you can game on one, and will have a hard time avoiding trying it, as the cornucopia of games you can get for free starts with a bunch pre-installed.

Reflecting on all this, I would bet the PC-vs.-console debate breaks out along clear age lines. (W/ the usual exceptions, of course; I know at least one guy in his late 30s with an xbox and no PC; he's a construction worker and that doesn't require him to have a PC, though his boss has to.) However, PC gaming is not going to die; that is just silly. The installed base of consoles is a tiny percentage of that of PCs (even just counting gaming-capable PCS), and the latter is guaranteed to increase as steadily as global modernization. Of course, people will keep having children, too, so there will always be young people, and they may well choose consoles while they don't need a desktop. Or may choose both, for the couch option. Still, PCs are necessary now in a way consoles are not. I think gaming is obviously 'dead' or dying on neither and won't be; it certainly won't be on PCs.

My problem with consoles still remains: since the great majority of those grownups who are in a position to have a hobby like gaming already have PCs, do they really need a toy "computer" too, just to play a few rather expensive games that are exclusive to that toy computer? I guess perhaps; if Darkside or whatever is really better than all the PC games put together I'll never have time to play because there are so many PC games, I can't even find time to try the demos for some seriously cool-sounding ones.

I still feel like I need an XBox about as much as I need a TV in my car, though; which is to say, not at all; except less than that -- I can't spare the distraction or the time, and the money, while not out of reach, still seems a waste. I'd rather keep another Haitian kid alive for a year with the $ it would cost to buy an XBox and half a dozen games for it. I could mess with my budget, but not gonna. Especially if i have to alt-tab out of CODMW2 to do it. :)

But you'll get more bang for your buck with a console in its initial release, and then 5 years later, PC will be comparable on the end of the consoles life, ( like it is now, and we've been hearing talk of new consoles soon). My PC from 2004 i've upgraded twice, and spent probably +800 in easily, i've spent $450 on 1 console, and $35 a year for online..savagetwinkie

So I confess I do not grasp how the console gives anything like "more bang for the buck." At $450, you're paying 60% as much for a game machine as you would for an actual personal computer, for heaven's sake. And there's no consensus at all it even plays games better; which it would absolutely have to do to be even in contention as worth it; since that's all it *can* do. I must be missing something. Maybe the couch/TV bit is more important than I would have thought.

Having been a part of the hw upgrade scene for 10 years; the argument about PC gaming not beeing expensive is **** If you dont have any hw from to canibalize from you are looking at 2000 USD to buy a minimum of the stuff you need for PC gaming. Everybody has a TV, so buying a console costs less than 450 USD to get everything you need. Console is easier and give more value for the money. Buy a game, put it in the slot, game on!ketle

So I am a little confused about what you think costs $2,000 for a perfectly game-capable PC. (I also make my living using my PC, which means the price is really about negative-$50,000;; that is, I come out $50,000 ahead per annum. Couldn't say that about a console, however cheap. Plus PC games are just a lot less expensive, down to free, which is as inexpensive as you can get; without actually making a really massive profit as I do on the hardware.)

How do you spend $2,000 on a PC without trying to be really spendthrift? Platinum-plate everything? Buy it from someone who also sells shares in the Brooklyn Bridge? Seriously? I mean, you *can,* but you can also insist that your car has to be a Lamborghini or it's not a car, it's a horse-drawn wagon. Untrue.

(And, I personally don't own a TV, actually. Many people do not. Most US *households* do own a TV of some sort, though not all of them; of those, the TVs are usually shared, and many are not adequate to play games on anyway. That's a far cry from saying everyone has a TV, if you mean every individual in the US has a game-playable personal TV all their own. E.g., my husband and I share a 15-year-old TV, which is technically his, as I don't watch enough TV to want my own. Now, I could of course use it when he's not, but we'd have been divorced for years by now fighting over the History Channel (his thing) vs. CoDMW2 (mine). Whereas I have to own a PC as well as wanting to; ref. the income thing, above. Also, you couldn't play games on our household TV at all -- at 15 years old it works fine if one is content to use it as a television or to watch DVDs on, but not as part of any kind of gaming setup at all. Indeed, game-ready TVs are more expensive than PCs that are adequate to do just about any personal computing one wants/needs; which is a lot more than you can do with any television -- like consoles, TVs are basically passive entertainment -- you take what you are given, hardware and software-wise, and you can do what the very limited tech will let you, which is pre-determined by the corporation that makes the given brand of console and the ones that make the games that run on it. PCs are tools. Very powerful tools; the tools that define our age the way mass mechanization defined the Industrial revolution.

Another point -- you can play a PC game with anyone with a PC (and that includes Macs; most can run Windows, and there are servers that both can use), but as I understand it, it's impossible to play a PC game w/ someone with a Nintendo or a Wii game with someone with an X-Box, or any permutation thereof; it's like post the Tower of Babel, or something, in terms of enforced inability to cross the company line. I myself don't like having my activities limited by Big Gaming, or my game friends, either. And that is totally aside from issues of graphic and gameplay superiority and so on, which are valid, but enough squabbling about that.

But obviously consoles have something going for them, since there are a lot of console fans. (Though not enough for the console industry to be profitable, which seems to spell trouble to me -- not sure if it's a wise investment, all other considerations aside.) Which I readily concede, as how can one not? Not enough to go buy one meself, when I have a lovely PC that runs like a dream and, when I'm not working on it, I can play any of a million or so games on, besides; but enough to grant that there must be a reason millions of people plus my friend Tim can't be pried off his couch and his X-Box. (Tim's an okay guy, and not more than normally insane, so no doubt he has reasons -- aside from being a TV addict, unemployed, and not having updated his PC since the Mac Quadra. But different strokes, etc.)

Yes, you're absolutely right about the paragraphs. My bad. Serves me right for not previewing. I write for a living and the software I use for that auto indents new paragraphs and skips a line when you hit "return." Forgot this might not do the same.

Fixed it on your recommendation.

We're consolites BECAUSE things like simplicity or kicking back on the couch with a gamepad are more important to us than the difference in graphics/controls/games between consoles and PC. If we didn't think that, wouldn't we have just bought PCs instead?lowe0

Ah, this is enlightening to me. I'm a PC gamer because owning a PC -- for work, for my writing, for highspeed online, for research, & the zillion other non-play reasons adults have PCs -- was how I got into gaming at all. (I had to own a PC; not to do so is no longer really an option for a working adult who's a professional.) I then quickly got hooked on thegames that are everywhere online; casual ones at first, then more hardcore ones as I found demos and timed trials and so on. And now I spend way too much time and money at it, and love it, to the detriment of both work and my social life. :) And for the same reasons I would never have become a console gamer, because before I started gaming I had no reason to buy an expensive-ish toy that one can use for the sole purpose of playing games on. (I did try console gaming once before really getting into PC gaming, while babysitting for my 4-y-o nephew (he was quite good :); but I just thought of it as a toy, not something I could not do life without, such as a PC.)

And I now I never feel or even quite understand the need to buy a console, because I'm always going to need and have a PC, and they're so inexpensive to upgrade now, and the gains in speed and power and utility so great, it's hardly a luxury to upgrade regularly enough to play the available games. Of which there are so many for the PC -- thousands, of all kinds, flight sims and sub games and shooters and MMOs and all the rest, and all the new free games and mods, many of them great, being created by other players all the time, plus demos everywhere online; that I don't have time to play a fraction of them. I certainly will never, ever run out of new ones to play. So I never saw the reason to buy a console; it seemed clearly redundant, and and the game choices so limited, and since console games are so much more expensive than PC games, an ongoing, significant expense for no purpose. Plus, since consoles sell a lot of units but almost all lose money, who knows if a given system would be around a year after I invested in it? Whereas PCs are not ever, ever going to go away (unless civilization does); on the contrary, they become more important and universal daily.

Which made me wonder WHY people bought consoles at all. (The couch thing seemed insignificant cf. to all the drawbacks.) But I simply did not understand that any significant number of people both old enough to game and with money enough to buy, or have bought for them, consoles and console games, might not HAVE a PC, and so saw it as a choice of which to get, PC or console; rather than a decision about whether to get a console -- a very, very simple, one-trick sorta-computer -- and expensive console games *in addition to* the very fine, game-capable (as well as full-computing capable) PC they had, and the free (or inexpensive, if they chose to spend) and sophisticated and graphically beautiful overabundance of PC games they only needed to Google and download and play.

So now I get it, partially at least, and thank you for that; it was an oddball mystery that sorta nagged. The couch thing I suppose accounts for other console buyers; and I can see that parents would buy them for kids they don't want messing w/ their PCs, like my nephew; certainly they do sell, and that they do so at a loss doesn't change that.

BUT, it is incontestable that if one of the two kinds of gaming "dies," as bizarre articles periodically mumble about, of the two it will not be PC gaming. Not while there are computers that are as multifunctional and essential to modern life as PCs, as well as computers as primitive (relatively speaking) and usable only for one form of play as consoles; not when you can already play more and more cheaply and just as well (I'd say better, imo, aside from the couch factor, which is not necessary to the gaming experience for me) on a PC. In between using said PC to trade stocks, scan and e-mail photos to Grandma, compare outcomes of surgery vs. not for your medical issue, plan a war, and/or do much of the work that earns your living, if you're at least a pink-collar worker, or your homework, if you're a student. If the day comes when there are no computers at all, well, then there will be neither PC nor console games; but then we'll be too busy living out Fallout 3 anyway. So I grasp at least one reason to buy a console; but PC gaming is in absolutely no danger of dying, or even waning; the reverse will be true sooner, though since people like their consoles, I hope that doesn't happen either.

I just got a 4650 for $55 from Newegg that I'm really happy with. (I was going to go for the 4670, but I had to work with an anorexic Dell Inspiron 530S case that only allows for low-profile, which onlythe Sapphire 4650 is.) Anyway, it's a sweet little card that should play Wow just fine. I'm psyched at the performance I'm getting from it: It plays COD4, COD5, and, I'm told by various folks posting reviews of the card on Newegg, the vast majority of Steam games at almost maxed out graphics at 1280x1024. No problem with games based on the Unreal 3 engine on high settings. I haven't not been able to play anything yet (that is, I download a lot of demos, and it's worked for all of them so far). And it runs fine off my Dell's wimpy 250W PSU, and it's super quiet. I haven't bothered overclocking it because I don't want to push the PSU, and I haven't needed to.

FWIW.

Rest of my system:

Dell Inspiron 530S

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400

3 GB

Newegg has great prices, and the shipping is lightning-fast. I haven't checked, but I can't imagine I'd do much better price-wise than the $55 I just paid for a Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. (Retail, with the assorted bennies that has over ebay -- returnability, warranty, an invoice to use for rebates (you can save a lot on Newegg's rebates), a customer service department if there'd been any hitches, etc. Card arrived in pristine shape less than 48 hours after purchase and took all of 10 mins. to install and get up and running, so I didn't need tech support -- though I had never opened a computer case except to plug in more memory, so that was a possibility -- anyway, I wouldn't have wanted to not have it available.

And, God, I love my new graphics card. I can *play everything* now w/ that little HD4650. I can play Crysis on High everything. This, on my off-the-rack Dell 130S, w/ the 250-watt power supply, and the anorexic case that will only take a low-form-factor-card in the one free PCIe slot. Seriously, I have yet to find a game, brand new or not, that I can't run w/ decent graphics and frame rate. (OK, except Shattered Horizons, which I meet the recommended requirements for but am told I still can't run. Go figure that.). Anyway, I'm in a very pro-Newegg frame of mind just now. The water in Crysis. I. Can see. The beauty... In fact I keep wanting to stop shooting and go swimming. :-)

(If nothing else, the Newegg site is worth a perusal in that there's huge value in the customer reviews posted for pretty much all products in their very extensive inventory. The customer base is distinctly tech-savvy, and the thoroughness of those reviews made up for my lack of any such expertise, making it possible for me to solve a tricky graphics issue at a brilliant price-point w/ zero hair-tearing.)

Oh, system specs: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @3.00 GHz, 3G RAM, video card = Radeon HD4650 (the Sapphire low profile), OS Vista.

I can report at this point that Call of Duty 4 is one cool-looking game. Runs fine. Goodbye, integrated graphics, hello games!!

Oh, and Crysis is gorgeous. I want to put my gun down and just go swimming in that water.

More seriously, Crysis is running at 35-45 FPS on medium (actually, I had it on high before turning Fraps on and didn't notice any sluggishness then either). I don't hear a thing from the new card's fan, either. Sweeeeet.