Sorry, but the PS5 Pro is worth $700

Gasp. Did he really just say the PlayStation 5 Pro is worth $700? Immediately after Sony revealed its new addition to the PS5 family, a shockwave was sent across the internet as gamers started to come to terms with a price point that’s never been seen on a console before. I won’t disagree that the console is expensive. It is, and I don’t think you should buy it. As a seasoned PC gamer, however, Sony’s console isn’t nearly as expensive as it comes off as at first blush.

Naturally, the debate between PS5 and PC is bound to come up when we’re talking about a $700 console. Why buy a console when you can build a much more powerful PC for $700? That’s true, you can build a much more powerful gaming PC for the same price as the PS5 Pro, and you’ll be much better off as a result. You can’t buy a much more powerful gaming PC for $700, however, and that’s where Sony’s pricing starts to make a little more sense.

It’s worth $700

I’ll be generous and say you have a budget between $700 and $800, assuming you’re in the market for a PS5 Pro in the first place. For that price, the options for prebuilt gaming PCs are few and far between. For instance, you can pick up the for $700 with an Intel Core i5-14400F and RTX 3050 GPU. It’s a powerful budget system for 1080p gaming, but when we’re talking about modern AAA releases outputting to 4K? The PS5 Pro will undoubtedly win. That’s before factoring in the supposedly larger GPU inside the console, too.

The main problem with buying a PC for $700 is that most of them are using modern components. Even our go-to recommendation for a budget sleeper gaming PC, the Dell XPS Desktop 8960, will run you $850 with the weakest discrete GPU — the RTX 3050, but stripped down to 6GB of VRAM. If vendors like Dell and Acer offered older CPUs and GPUs, you’d probably be able to get something on par or much better than the PS5 Pro for $700. There just aren’t a ton of