It took us over three years to build a $500 PC that could beat the PlayStation 5.
And even then there were some compromises.
And now we're conspiring to murder the PS5 Pro in less than a week?
It shouldn't be that hard. I mean that $200 price bump that everyone is angry about frees up a lot of money for our budget.
Except for one small problem, David. While $200 is certainly a lot of money, it doesn't buy that much these days.
And while we could have taken the easy path and just thrown a better GPU into our original killer,
this is LTT. We don't play on easy mode.
When we're done, we're going to have upgraded graphics, more features,
a case that doesn't look straight out of the Fallout universe, and the same or better performance than the PS5 Pro.
But be warned, this ain't going to be a smooth ride.
Unlike the smooth segue. To our sponsor.
Shut up. Oh, that's my boss.
I'm not going to lie. It was pretty cool when I heard the PS5 killer mentioned by the Mark Cerny,
lead system architect on the PS4 and PS5, even if he was being kind of salty about it.
I mean to be clear, I think he recognized that our declaration of victory
was obviously tongue in cheek, and that we do fully appreciate the gaming value that's on display from the PS5 hardware.
But he clearly still felt the need to call us out on shortcuts that we used,
like the fact that we used a secondhand motherboard in our system
while comparing it to a brand new disk based PS5.
But here's what you got wrong, Marky, my guy.
It was all used parts, not just to use motherboards.
So wait, no, that's worse.
And Mr. Cerny wasn't the only one to take issue with that comparison.
Many commenters accused us of giving an unfair advantage to team PC.
But as you would expect from any coverage of this topic,
the angry comments came from the other side too, with many of you accusing us of favoring team console.
Linus, you said. You didn't place enough value on the extra flexibility of the PC.
On the free online play or the cheaper larger game library.
But guys, look, not every video can be about every topic.
And today our goal is straightforward. We are going to beat the PS5 Pro in visual fidelity and frame rate at the same price.
We are still going to allow secondhand parts because, yes, Mark, we do need shortcuts to beat your wonderful machine.
But we are going to uncut as many other corners as possible,
which means getting the absolute most out of every penny we spend
starting with our CPU, the Intel Core i5-12400F.
And I can already hear you saying, Linus, Intel for gaming?
And yeah, to be clear, the AMD 5600X would have been our ideal pick.
And if they were priced identically, we would have gone team red,
just like Sony did for the PS5 Pro. But when we can save about $30 and still get a better CPU
than what's in any version of Sony's white monolith, it's kind of a no-brainer.
Once again, we aren't going with the exact specs of the machine we're competing against.
We've actually got two fewer processing cores,
but our cores are more powerful than Sony's, meaning that in gaming, we should come out ahead.
And the included cooling, that's a nice little bonus for additional savings.
The leap over to team blue comes with other benefits as well.
Now that the LGA1700 platform has been out for a few years,
there are some cheap motherboards out there. Like this ASRock B660M HDV that we found for under $40.
Now you don't need to go for this one in particular. In fact, if it wasn't for the outstanding deal we got,
we would have preferred something with a couple of Gen4 NVMe slots and built-in Wi-Fi.
But going used means you need to be flexible and snag whatever works and is cheap.
But hey, at least being B660, it does support higher speed XMP memory kits.
Like this one. This, our 16 gig kit of G-Skill RipJaws 5.
Now it's worth noting that because of our CPU choice,
we could have gone with DDR5 and a DDR5 motherboard.
But this kit was just 20 bucks and every penny counts,
especially now that we need to match the PS5 Pro's 2TB of storage.
And we did! Or at least we were supposed to. This is 1TB.
It was marked in inventory as 2TB. We're still counting the price of a 2TB one against our total.
I see. Okay, now you probably noticed this is a pretty decent looking SSD.
Last time around we didn't have a high-end SSD and we justified our choice by pointing out that
it doesn't really have an impact on real world gaming performance.
But this time we're challenging ourselves to do better
and we found something that meets Sony's minimum recommended requirements for a secondary drive.
And we went with the WD Black SN850X,
which we found for a little under $75, and which happens to be Tom's hardware's pick for best PS5 SSD.
Though it should be noted that there are other options out there at very reasonable prices.
You smell that? That's the smell of a right angle.
Get it? Because we didn't cut the corner anymore?
Anyway, for our case, we chose this perfectly decent mid-size NZXT H510 that we found for $30 on Facebook Marketplace.
Okay, eagle eyes, it's not the exact same one, but come on.
What's the point of us buying that black one that someone else could use
when we have this white one sitting in our warehouse? And besides, the point is not the exact case.
There are a ton of options out there around this price point,
including some much more fun ones if you don't mind rolling the dice.
We also found some older model cases that have support for an optical drive if that's your thing,
but we won't need one this time around because the PS5 Pro doesn't have one either.
Thanks for the free right angle, comrades of Ken Kuduragi.
When it comes to raw power, there are any number of power supplies that could do the job,
but we didn't want a shoddy heartbeat for our Sony Slayer here,
so after looking through a number of reputable units at the right price,
we settled on this Corsair CX750 for $35.
$750? Yeah, that sounds kind of overkill considering that the PS5 Pro draws less than half of that,
but we're going to need it to power a GPU that can beat the Pro,
which I guess brings us perfectly to the star of any good gaming PC.
And also the star of the PS5 Pro, if you consider that the GPU changes
are the only ones that really impact performance. Sony made a big deal out of the big three, larger GPU with 45% better raw performance,
more advanced ray tracing hardware, and a new AI-driven upscaling that they call PSSR.
Ever since the announcement, I've been very eager to get my hands on this bad boy
to see what kind of PC card that's going to translate to in the real world.
We can make some guesses, the closest comparison could be a downclocked 7800 XT,
but the not yet seen ray tracing hardware and custom better than FSR, but not quite DLSS upscaling
makes us wonder if we're going to need to wait for AMD's 8000 series for a tree equivalent.
One way to avoid giving up features would be to go for an NVIDIA RTX 4070,
because as Digital Foundry pointed out, its feature set more closely matches the new console.
But when it came to decision time, we felt that this XFX Quick 7800 XT with its higher
raw performance would make up for the lack of shiny features and help us secure another win
for Team PC. What are we looking at for our total? 655 dollars.
Wait, really? That leaves enough for a sketchy Windows key, that 8bitdo controller we checked
out recently, and even some stick logs from LTTstore.com to cover those precious analog
nubbins during transport. But I couldn't help noticing there's still no Wi-Fi 7.
Okay, well that's a bit of a corner, isn't it? But, but, hold on. If we built this machine using the absolute lowest prices we found,
Scrapyard War style, maybe we could get it at a lower price?
535 dollars. Not bad. That's a potential $165 of budget to play with for a Wi-Fi card and, I don't know,
other stuff. But would you use the money for Linux? That's a tough question, because you're not going to go up another class of GPU,
and you could upgrade your CPU, but that's probably not going to affect gaming performance
that much. I think the best use of it is a pretty well-rounded system. Probably just go for some
games. Speaking of, let's do a side-by-side. How close are we here? I definitely am seeing
some weird moire in my rug. Me as well. But, oh, you are too.
Yeah. Right now I've set our PC to the PS5's Ray Trace performance mode, which is
the ideal way to play on PS5 base, but we probably want to mess with the settings a little bit to
get a little more visual fidelity and see what we can squeeze out.
Question for you. Where is it? Oh, yeah, no. We're still getting some pop-in from the confetti.
It looks about the same on both of them. Honestly, when we did the ShortCircuit on the PS5 Pro,
I didn't find that the PS5 and the Pro looked that different in this game.
And I'm having a hard time picking anything. Oh, the grass. Your grass is noticeably higher
fidelity than mine. Yeah. Okay. If I want to catch up, I'm going to have to change that.
Nothing here looks like it's going to help with that. All I can really do is...
I think it's just resolution and FSR. So FSR will be in display.
Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Interesting. Does it look closer to yours right now?
Yeah. Because we looked at... I swear, when we were looking at it before, it was...
Hold on. Okay, I'm going back. Oh, yeah. Now it's poo-poo again.
That's so interesting. It's so blurry. What do I have to change to make it operate?
Like it does in the menu. Look at this. Am I supposed to be able to see what I'm changing?
No, definitely not. We're definitely getting 1% lows below 60.
Ray tracing is on, which is definitely not the 7800 XT's, you know, Forte, but that's the tradeoff.
I think in this game, we're going to have to say there's an advantage for the PS5 Pro.
It is an exceptionally well-optimized game, even on the base PS5. So the PS5 Pro just
gets that extra little bit. However, with that said, if you had me blind taste test these,
I would not object to either of them. This is a great experience if you want to play Rift Apart.
I watched something that I've been curious to see for myself and I would be able to tell the
difference with PSSR for one big issue, which is some of its upscaling looks like it's moving.
If you look at those lines in the deck, you can see them kind of like moving and they're not
supposed to be. Like they're supposed to be stationary. Oh, okay. So hold on a second.
See? Yours are just stationary. So there's motion artifacting or something. I saw that in a digital
foundry video and I've been curious to see that. So we've got some advantages and disadvantages
both ways. Yes. I'm just looking at the confetti in there. Inside? Yeah. I think mine is just going
to crap. FSR has no idea what to do with it. It's pretty bonkers. There's a lot of motion artifacts
and it's clear that the PS5 Pro's upscaling is doing a much better job here. Like it's really hard,
but if you can catch one with your eye and try to follow it around, you can follow a piece of
confetti around yours. Mine? Good luck. That's just a garbled mess. Yeah, that's pretty bad. Overall,
the motion is still there. It's moving clockwise or whatever, but those are individual objects and
that's just, it's shredded almost. My foliage doesn't look way worse than yours here though.
Oh, my trees do though. That was background. Yeah, the background trees look so flat. Should we
change the setting? I think this is an L. I think the PS5 Pro might take the win on this one. I had
everything set to high, but I think we're going to want to mess with the settings again. I think
your menu looks better though. Like substantially. Oh, would you like to enable the pro rendering
mode? Here we go. Yes. We reset these displays right before we started, and when we were using
them for PS5 versus PS5 Pro on ShortCircuit, they looked the same. I thought Windows 11
each share was supposed to be good. You just said you liked mine better. That's true. Hey,
did I load first? I think you might have loaded faster than the PS5 Pro. Got him. Oh, no, just
dang it. Tune the two. Wow, that's remarkably close.
I feel like your hair is better, but maybe I'm just at an angle. That's true. I think your textures
are worse. If they are, it's not by much, dude. I think, like the photos are a little bit clearer
here. I don't know if that's a PSSR thing, because it looks like it's doing some weird
work on their shirts. Oh, yeah. Dude, I would rather have the softer photo than the, like,
shimmery line on it. It's distracting. Are you getting a good solid 60 FPS? Oh, yeah. This is
very 60 FPS-y. Me too. Looks like your 1% lows are a little bit lower, but I wouldn't be able to tell.
Not with any kind of variable refresh rate. The fact that we can be this close to the screen
and not tell the difference, I think, tells the story. Yeah, they both look great. They both
look fantastic. I think we could call this close enough. Yeah, I think we could probably tweak
settings and get it a little bit better, but you're already at your performance threshold, so.
Yeah, I think this is as good as it's going to get. Wow, this is not good. Oh, wow. Yeah, you're
40-ish. I'm not even, no, I don't even think I believe what Frameview is saying. Dude, touch this.
Oh, yeah, that's like sub 30. No, wait, that's way. This is bad. The pacing here is terrible.
Turn off your ray tracing. You know, I'm going to turn V-Sync off and see if that helps. Yeah,
that helps a lot. Okay. And now it feels like what it says it is. The thing about V-Sync is if you
dip below the target frame rate, in many cases, it will actually have to dip even lower in order
to ensure smooth delivery of frames. And if you are oscillating between them, it can feel extremely
stuttery, worse than if you just didn't have it at all. And in this case, this was clearly the
right play. I'm getting a little bit of tearing, but this is way smoother. It doesn't look as smooth
as yours, though. Once again, your HDR pops. So much more than mine. And for those of you
looking at frame view up here and doubting that HDR is working, my menu pops. Like HDR
is definitely on on both of these displays. It says HDR mode right here. ASUS Gaming HDR.
Trust me, we reset them right before we started. We did learn when we did the last PS5 killer
that Intel's implementation of HDR just plain didn't work because there's a lot of proprietary
nonsense that both AMD and NVIDIA have baked into their drivers to get the bloody thing working.
So we could be seeing some of that here. It could also be that Windows HDR,
just plain isn't that great. I'm curious, kind of come stand on that semicircle and look at the
background because I'm getting a lot of that motion upscaling crap in the in the background again.
Yours looks a lot more stable. No, mine's clean. But I think you need to turn down some settings
to get to 60. Yeah. Okay. I don't like PSSR. I think it looks bad. Like look at this tree.
Am I crazy? Is that like that's... No, you're not crazy. That's a lot worse than mine. Have a look.
I expected this to be better than FSR. And I think, you know... Well, it is better than FSR.
But it's not better than just if you aren't using as much FSR. That's fair. I have a more powerful
GPU than you. Yes. However, it's pretty clear that I'm not getting an even 60 FPS. And honestly,
all things considered, I'd probably take that gaming experience. Really, hey? I mean here.
Try it. Swapsies. Oh, yeah. All right. And I'm not looking at this going, wow, what a huge
difference in visual fidelity when I'm actually playing the game. If I'm not sitting in pixel peeping.
Now, these are both more than adequate. It would be fine with either of these.
I think I would be prepared without changing one setting at a time and rebooting the whole game.
I think I'd be prepared to call this one pretty much a tie. Yeah.
It's not quite there. I don't think we're quite there. But it's pretty close. It's pretty close.
Let's close this out by answering some questions. Is the PS5 Pro as bad a value as people are making
it out to be? Well, I think that depends who you are. If you have a 1080p display, absolutely
do not buy this machine. If you have a 4K display, though, and a base PS5, you could get anywhere
from 250 to even more for your current machine, meaning the upgrade is going to cost you 350 to
$450. That is a pretty tough sell. The PS5 Pro definitely looks better. But from TV distance,
I feel like only the discerningest of gamers are going to easily pick the Pro out of a lineup.
With that said, if you're coming into the PlayStation 5 ecosystem fresh,
it's undoubtedly the better machine. It's the definitive PlayStation 5 experience.
And for $250 more, it's no worse of a deal as we just showed than spending another $250
on a gaming PC for better fidelity. Because I don't really think that our extra couple hundred
bucks blew away what Sony was able to do with the extra budget. I wouldn't judge you then for going
for the PS5 Pro, but just be aware that you'll have to factor in an external disk drive if you
want to get the best deals on games. As we showed recently, it's definitely worth the investment
if you buy more than a small handful of games each generation. The other big question is,
PS5 Pro versus our PS5 Pro Killer PC. Well, if you're the buy everything news sort,
this machine is going to run you around $900 before tax. We're going to have links
to all the parts in the video description. Now over time, you might make up that difference
in cheaper games and extra utility, but not everybody has a couple hundred extra dollars
upfront, which means that the choice is not exactly clear. As for our second hand machine,
well, I think there's a ton of value here. I love this machine. I love this configuration. And I
would strongly recommend scrapyard warring yourself. I kick ass gaming rig like this.
But before Mark Serney calls me out in another interview, I fully acknowledged that, yeah,
we killed the PS5 Pro, but we also threw sand in its eyes before the fight even started. So,
pocket sponsor. Yeah. If you guys liked watching us kill the Pro and haven't seen us murder the
original PS5, why don't you check out that video? It's a surprisingly different machine.