Cost

To compare the cost of gaming, we decided to tally up the cost of a console, along with the kit needed to get each machine into a state we considered suitable for our typical high-end lounge setup. For the PC, it's obviously trickier to assess. Buying an entire PC for the price of a console is difficult, but not impossible, but as you can upgrade your machine, you may not need a completely new one. To reflect the PC's hardware costs, we included the price of the key components for turning a base unit into a good gaming machine: a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card and PSU, along with gaming peripherals, a headset and wireless networking to make its spec as similar to the consoles as possible. To this hardware we then added a selection of games for each gaming system: one exclusive title and a range of cross-platform games. Where the cross-platform games weren't available for the Wii, we substituted another top-tier title.

It's clear just how much cheaper PC games are. Guitar Hero 3, with its controller, costs only £44.99 on the PC, 30 per cent cheaper than the 360 version. Call of Duty 4 was £10 cheaper on the PC, and the Orange Box was, at £17.98, half the price it was on both 360 and PS3. Overall, the bundle of six games was around a third cheaper on the PC than it was with the 360 - proof that the 'console tax' is alive and well. Nintendo games were cheaper than PS3 and 360-only titles, although non-Nintendo Wii games such as Guitar Hero 3 and Need for Speed: Pro Street were a similar price to the 360 and PS3 versions.

The Wii is the cheapest system, in part because there isn't much else to buy besides another controller and some games. The PC was the most expensive, but not by a massive margin - it's priced within £120 of the 360's cost, and with the PC, you get a full computer that can do a lot more besides playing games and media. In fact, if you were to focus hardware buying solely on the graphics card, the component that most determines how a PC can handle games, the PC looks cheap, and the more games you buy, the bigger the difference between consoles and the PC will be.

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