Why the Xbox Series X Is a Great Buy (If You Can Find One)

howtogeek.com:

Gaming became an expensive hobby after the pandemic began and silicon shortages worsened. While you might not be able to build your dream gaming PC right now, you might be able to get your hands on an Xbox Series X instead.

Consoles should offer good value for money, but that’s not always the case from the outset. Events like a price drop or a hardware revision can affect the value proposition, but in the current climate (writing in January 2022) even a Series X is good value for money at launch price.

This has much to do with the ongoing semiconductor shortage. As a result of the global pandemic (and a few natural disasters), many chip manufacturers are working through a backlog of orders which has put the squeeze on just about every industry that relies on them.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the PC GPU space, where scarcity has made buying a graphics card more like winning a lottery. Many of these cards are snapped up immediately by scalpers who sell them for vastly inflated prices. According to December 2021 trends tracked by Tom’s Hardware, even “low-end” cards like the GeForce RTX 3060 average around $761 on eBay; while AMD’s 1080p budget option like the RX 6600 fetch $578 on average.

This has had a domino effect for the second-hand GPU market, where cards that predate the latest generation of consoles like the GeForce RTX 1660 Ti average $500, the same price as a Series X console at MSRP. The card that most closely matches the performance output of the Series X is AMD’s RX 6700 XT which averages just shy of $900 on eBay.

And that’s just the price of the GPU. You’ll then need to assemble the rest of your PC components, including a CPU (similar demand and scalping issues), RAM, a motherboard, some storage, and a