The PS5 Pro has landed. Can the modern-day PC compete?

STEP- BY-STEP GUIDE PG. 22

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NO DOUBT you’ve heard the buzz around Sony’s latest announcement. The PS5 Pro has landed for pre-order. Grab your hats, because it can supposedly game at 4K 60 fps, and has a 45 percent increase in graphical horsepower versus its predecessor. At least, that’s what Sony tells us. The reality is, of course, that a lot of this is still up in the air. We’ve seen some teasing about its feature set, mention of super-resolution AI upscaling, ray tracing, 8K compatibility, the usual hubbub, but the biggest kicker is that it comes in at $700. That’s a lot of cash all of a sudden for a console.

And let’s be clear, it’s not a massive upgrade on the $500 PS5 Slim. RAM and CPU are the same; it’s only the GPU and SSD that are changing. Nonetheless, it got us thinking: There’s another arena that’s seen continual price increases, and they’ve been far less forgiving. We are, of course, talking about the gaming PC.

Once upon a time, a well-specced custom build could indeed compete with that generation of consoles. Today, it’s a whole other ball game. Still, with the Ryzen 9000 series being a less interesting chip launch than it seems to be, we decided to run something a little different this issue. We just had to see if we could build something unique, a little special, which is why we’re seeing what kind of ITX performance we can manage at a reasonable price, and whether or not we can even start to compete with the likes of Sony’s undisclosed PS5 Pro. Strap in folks, this one’s going to be a serious challenge.

–ZAK STOREY

CPU

INTEL CORE I5-14600K