 So in November of 2013 we released this video. It did a great job of covering the differences in image quality between consoles and PCs at the time, but it's 2015 and the landscape has changed a fair bit. Traditionally, consoles will increase in image quality over time as developers get more comfortable with the platform by learning what it can and actually cannot do, but at the same time the cost of PC parts relative to their performance is always going down. So back then the PS4 looked like a really compelling gaming box with the Xbox One being larger, slower, and pointing a camera at you at all times, but some of those things have changed. So has the answer changed? Stay tuned to find out and stay subscribed to Linus Tech Tips if you're a fan of five gallon buckets. Corsair's H80i GT and H100i GTX all-in-one liquid coolers improve both the appearance and cooling of your PC. Click now to learn more. This time around there will be five contenders. The still bulky but cheaper and no longer camera burden to Xbox One. The PlayStation 4, which evidently Sony thought was just fine the way it was. Our new and improved entry-level PC configured by STRMAPE and priced at around 400 USD. And our new and improved high-end machine priced at a lot, like 1500 or something like that. And last but not least is the Thrift Machine 4000, which is the combination of the best parts of our used machines from the Scrapyard Warriors series, which you should definitely watch if you haven't already. Seriously, middle click this now, pause this video so you don't have two audio tracks running, go watch that one, and then come back to this one. I'll wait. In the forum thread linked below this video, you'll be able to see download links for all the raw footage taken from these machines so you can actually see what it actually looked like instead of seeing it after YouTube has kind of messed with it. Starting with the low-end PC, its pros are largely based around it being cheap. Whether or not you get Windows or not, you're probably going to be somewhere around 400, 500 dollars. And then it's going to be more functional at that cost than a console. You'll be able to game, of course, but you'll also be able to stream in both directions. Video editing, photo editing, web browsing, word editing, basic office documentation, all that kind of stuff, huge amounts of functionality. And if you want more from it, you can upgrade it in the future. Of course, this is to additional cost, but if you need more RAM, if you need a better graphics card, if you want more storage for your 350 free-con-steam games, you can accommodate that. You can also pick the settings for all of those games, which is actually really nice. With a console, you're locked into whatever they think is good. You're not going to be able to change your resolution or your frame rate or your quality settings in the mass majority of cases. Whereas on a computer, you'd be able to change everything in a mass majority of cases, which is actually quite fantastic. And you can decide if you want more performance in terms of FPS or if you want more nice-looking images in terms of resolution or quality settings. Also, accessories are potentially a lot cheaper, but this is where we bridge the gap to cons, because accessories for a PC can also be quite a bit more expensive. Although for the low-end PC, this is still mostly a pro. It's now moving to cons. It's a PC, but it's not that great of a PC. You're probably not going to want to do a ton of like surround gaming or anything like that on here, but that's not a huge deal. There are issues with things like longevity. It's a low-end PC, and there's some low-end components in here, like super sketchy power supplies and other things that may kind of fail down the road. There's also no console exclusives, and while this is a pro that you have PC exclusives as well, I don't know. It's also a con that you don't get to play the console ones, of course. With the used PC, the pros are that it's insanely cheap. With the cheap PC, we saw a very low $400 to $500 price point. With used PC, you're going to be able to easily get a computer for $400 or less at a very high level of performance, very comparable with the low-end PC or even better in some cases. You can get a lot of these parts if you're thrifty enough and willing to wait, possibly for free even. Old recycled computers, your mom's old computer, or your friend's old computer, or just anyone who's able to drop down some parts. You can take anything from it that's valuable, maybe some extra RAM or just the power supply or a hard drive or something. If you zombie apart some computers, you can save a lot of money there. You might even be able to find a free operating system in that process if you find a hard drive that just happens to come with one, which is kind of awesome because then there's additional savings there as well. If some people are going to point out that the parts might fail, well, if your hard drive fails, stuff like Steam Cloud is going to be able to preserve your save games, which is actually quite fantastic. A lot of these kind of like Origin and Steam and Uplay and stuff will have cloud save options, so you don't even really have to worry about that failing. And if you're kind of just zombifying a few computers, you might have a few extra hard drives laying around, so your get up and go time might not even be that long. That being said, it's used hardware and things might fail. I know I just said that might be okay because we build swap things in and out, but there's the very high chance that you won't have a spare part for whatever just failed. And if it's a hard drive, I did just say that you might have cloud save data, but you probably won't have a backup of other things. You might be able to have multiple hard drives, but it's very likely when you lose a hard drive, if it's not in a proper raid or if you don't have a proper scheduled backup or both, you're very likely going to be losing data, which is not cool. The OS might even be pirated. You don't necessarily know unless you're getting it from a very repeatable source, and that's another sketchy thing. Stuff like the power supply in the low-end PC was a little sketchy, but you might have all sketchy parts in your used PC. It's just a risk. The pros of high-end PCs is that they're crazy freaking blazing fast. You'll be able to get great image quality in any game that you play, great anti-aliasing detailing levels, great high-end video editing or high-end content creation of any kind, realistically. Surround gaming with three monitors for like sick setups with racing or flying games, or even high-demand VR where you might need 90 FPS to go along with your 90 hertz headset and in very high quality as well, so it's very immersive. That's really hard to do, and you might be able to do that with a high-end PC. You can also do stuff like streaming, the things like Nvidia shields or possibly Steam Link down the line, although you might or might not need a high-end PC for that, we'll have to see. The cons of this at the same time though is that while its performance is badass, its cost is really not great. It's going to be super crazy expensive, and while you have the nice form factor of the PlayStation 4 and the not quite as nice form factor of the Xbox One, they're both relatively small, and a very high-end PC, well not necessarily, it's probably going to be very large. A lot of people that are building high-end PCs are building them in full towers or mid towers, which are relatively really big compared to a PlayStation 4. Next up is Xbox One or X-Bone, for the people like saying it that way. It has a better camera solution than the other console. Its connect is actually fairly powerful, although some people might find it annoying, but we'll talk about that later. Voice control is cool. Voice control is a modern way of interacting with devices, and the Xbox One has it for a ton of different reasons. And cloud servers for a better gaming experience. Is that a thing yet? Either way, it's a benefit for now. It's also a flexible entertainment device. You can watch TV and sports and stuff through it. Maybe a little bit weird, maybe not something you're looking for, but it is a benefit of the device. Cons, however, are where the hell is the performance increase from the Microsoft cloud servers? I just brought this up as a pro, but we don't really see it as much as it was kind of toted around when they were talking about it. Also, voice control. Another thing I just brought up as a pro. Doesn't really work that well. The amount of times that people have been trolled by someone shouting Xbox off is insane. I wonder how many Xboxes I just turned off. It's a little janky right now. Voice control isn't really where it needs to be in general, especially not for a solution like this. Crazy weird resolutions are not great. Something like 792p for watch dogs is just really weird and is going to make it look not super awesome in the end. And in terms of performance, it's just worse than a PS4 if you're comparing directly console to console. It's not as powerful as a PS4. And with all consoles, all modern consoles, other than, I guess, Wii U, it requires a monthly payment for online freaking access. The PlayStation 4, more games are going to run at 1080p than the Xbox One. It doesn't have a giant power brick like the Xbox One does, which is actually kind of nice, just a direct cable from the wall. It also has very low standby power. The while running performance power might not be super great, but your console is going to be sitting in standby more often than not while you're at work or school or whatever. So its standby power is actually quite important. It also performs better in general. I know I brought up the 1080p thing, but general performance is better than an Xbox One and this is fairly opinionated, but it's very attractive housing. It looks really good. The Xbox One is kind of clunky and yeah, it might look like certain home theater things, but the PlayStation 4 looks modern. The angles look really sharp. It just looks really good overall. I'm not going to get into controller comparisons here because that's extremely preference, but anyways, moving on to cons. The PlayStation 4 also lacks additional functionality, again, compared to the Xbox One. It isn't able to do as many kind of random small things that the Xbox One can do. It doesn't have the nice kind of TV mode, if that's something you're looking for. The camera isn't as highly functioning. It doesn't have the same voice control kind of stuff. It's missing a lot of those things and you're also required, just like the Xbox One, to pay monthly for online access. Very annoying. Honestly, the visual fidelity on all platforms was quite good and it was actually a little hard to tell between a high-end PC and an Xbox One. You could tell, but you had to look pretty closely. What do you guys think? Be sure to check out that footage in the video description down below on the forum where you can download the more high bitrate files instead of the YouTube compression crap, which is probably what you saw throughout this video. Developers seem to be kind of harnessing these new consoles much better, but again, it's a lot easier to build a very low-end, very affordable machine which can beat out the consoles now, which is kind of nice for PC guys as well. Now another thing, Shadow of Mordor and Far Cry 4 may not have been the best games to like really push the high-end PC, so we'll kind of have to see if there's other games out there. And what games would you guys actually suggest? Again, let me know down in the comments below or preferably over on the forum. Speaking of good things, XSplit. XSplit powers countless live streams and recordings throughout the world. With the recent release of XSplit V2, you can experience powerful new production tools that have been built to meet today's standards of content creators. Whether you're a professional streamer, like we technically are, I guess, or you just want to try streaming for your first time, or if you're someone who just wants to broadcast gameplay to show friends a few new tips and tricks, XSplit will allow you to create professional quality live broadcasts and video recordings with their simple and intuitive interface. We use XSplit every week to broadcast and record our live podcast, The WAN Show. XSplit allows you to easily manage guests through Skype or other various things, and you can hook directly into games via GameSource, which ensures high fidelity capture with a minimum performance loss, and even lets you easily stream and record your gaming moments with GameCaster, which has an easy-to-use in-game overlay to manage all of your streaming and recording settings. So head over to xsplit.com slash Linus to check out what they have to offer and claim your free XSplit license. Their free license gives you everything you need to start streaming and recording in HD, so pick up yours today. All right guys, so like I said earlier, the quality comparison was a lot closer this time than it was last time. Do you think that was my fault in selection of games, or do you think that's kind of a way that the gaming industry is going? Is it this giant conspiracy that they're nerfing the PC versions? What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments down below or on the forums. Personally, I was actually pretty impressed with how the consoles did, although I would still personally prefer the solution of a PC because there's more options and things you can do. What do you think? Again, comments down below on the forum. While you're on YouTube, subscribe, like, dislike, favorite, share, all those kind of things. While you're on the forum or just in your web browser in general, change your Amazon links by going to our support us link on the forum and checking out how to do that. That'll help us a lot whenever you buy things like PCs or games or consoles or controllers or whatever you want, anything. It'll help us give us little kickbacks over time. Also, check out the link in the video description for a cool shirt. We've got a whole bunch of different ones running on right now. And I know a few of you were complaining about stock. We've just refreshed stock on a quite few of those shirts. So yeah, anyways, thanks for watching. I'll see you guys next time.