Xbox Series X vs PS5 vs PC – The Specs Compared

pczone.co.uk:

Now that we’re all stuck at home and no longer have an excuse not to play video games all day, there’s no better time to discuss the tech reveals of the next-gen consoles – and of course, compare them (however misleadingly) to high-end PC hardware.

Xbox Series X (dumbest name ever) and PS5 (most obvious name ever) have just had, in what must be a first for games consoles, detailed official teardowns of their internal hardware many months before launch.

Before we discuss the key points and draw exaggerated conclusions, here’s a useful table outlining the key specs of each console, along with a reasonably high-end PC set up as comparison:

First off and as expected, both next-gen consoles use AMD’s Zen architecture. An unexpected bonus is that both systems will get full utilisation of the Zen 2 refresh that is yet to be released in the PC space.

The old Jaguar cores in Xbox One and PS4 date back to 2011 and were at best mediocre mobile chips so the bump to AMD’s latest and better-engineered architecture will prove a huge boost to CPU performance before we even compare clock speeds.

Base PS4 had 8 cores running at a measly 1.6 GHz. As you can see from the graph, both PS5 and XSX (I’m gonna refer to the new Xbox this way for the rest of the article) get up to 3.5 GHz and 3.6 GHz respectively (if both using SMT – a special hyper-threading tech – otherwise XSX can achieve 3.8 GHz). So the numbers are very similar between the two – they’ll be no discernable difference.

It’s an enormous increase in speed alone over last-gen, but numbers-wise it doesn’t get close to what a PC chip can achieve for certain periods. Intel’s i5 9600k (a favourite among PC gamers) has a base clock of 3.6 GHz and boosts to 4.6 GHz (nearly 5 GHz on a single