‘PS5 Pro is better value than it seems but it’s still ridiculous’

A Reader’s Feature compares the cost of the PS5 Pro with a similarly specced gaming PC and finds there’s not as much difference as you’d think.

A lot has been made of the cost of the new PS5 Pro, and rightly so. £700 is a lot of money to stump up for a home console and easily puts it out of the range of many families, never mind something like a birthday present for a youngster. Like many others, my immediate reaction was to laugh and say they had totally lost the plot.

It did get me thinking however, of just how realistic this price is compared to an equivalent(-ish) gaming PC or if the new hardware warrants such a jump in price.

So, let’s start with the PC. Without going into too much detail, I’ve checked out the specs and generally considered equivalences from the current PlayStation 5 and what has been shown so far for the PS5 Pro.

I’ve picked out a nice AMD CPU (Ryzen 7 5800X) with an AMD GPU (RX 7700 XT) which should deliver similar performances to a PS5 Pro in terms of raw output. Add in a 2GB SSD, some RAM, a cooler, a case, a motherboard, and a PSU and I have a relatively decent gaming PC, albeit with some budget choices to keep costs down. The final damage? Just over the £750 mark.

This doesn’t include any software but obviously does have the ability to run other things, and potentially crash and give many, many errors when running games (the joy of PC gaming).

The PS5 Pro benefits from fixed hardware and software and developers are able to work with this knowledge to ensure that they get the most from the system, which is never possible with the billions of permutations of PC hardware setups. So, arguably, a PS5 Pro would run games designed for the PS5 Pro better than an equivalent PC would.

Well, it should do if the developers are doing their job right. The closed ecosystem means you shouldn’t need to worry about updating drivers, graphics settings, or anything else in order to get the game to run as it should and is certainly easier for the end user.

Now, in terms of actual updated hardware, the changes in GPU costs are hard to really quantify, but the original PlayStation 5 model was considered to be equivalent in output to something akin to a Nvidia RTX 3060 and the difference in price between that and the one in my build above is currently around £100. Admittedly, you can buy a RTX 4060 for the cost of a new 3060 these days, so it is a little misleading.

The difference in price between a 1TB and 2TB hard drive is a further £50 or so. I’m assuming some further alterations to heating arrangements within the system may also push costs a little higher up, so an increase of £150-200 would not be unrealistic for the actual specs it is providing. Many PC users would happily pay £150 for the supposed increase in frame rate that this will offer.

Now, in reality it has jumped over £300, comparing digital to digital, and removed the vertical stand, which will be a further £25. This does seem excessive and if they can manufacture and sell the original PlayStation 5 for £389, I’m really not convinced that the increase in price for the PS5 Pro is fully justified.

It almost feels like they’re trying to recoup some losses on the sale of the base model here. On a side note, I’ve not checked Amazon/eBay but I assume they will soon be flooded with 3D printed vertical stands for the princely sum of £5-10.

So what did I learn doing this? No way can I build an equivalent PC to a PS5 Pro (or PlayStation 5) for the same cost to run games on. Even if I did build one to match, it probably wouldn’t run them as well, as they do on the console but the increase in price seems steep compared to the original PlayStation 5 prices and not necessarily good value for money.

I still totally believe this is a crazy price for a home console and I dread to see what the PlayStation 6 or next Xbox will retail at. How long will it be until we hit the £1,000 mark? It probably doesn’t help that I am someone for whom 30fps is absolutely fine and I find it very hard to see/feel a difference playing at 60fps on a console or even 140fps on the PC, so plugging the whole upgrade as being 60fps fidelity is not going to make me part with any more money. Just give us some good games please Sony.

By reader Adam W

PS: I didn’t even want to start going into the full PlayStation ecosystem cost for this generation – with PS5 Pro, PlayStation VR2, and PlayStation Portal we’re nearing the £1,500 mark without any games!