$700 for a PS5 Pro Is a Better Deal Than People Realize
The PS5 Pro may be expensive, but it is still a good deal.
The $700 price of the PS5 Pro has left many PlayStation fans with sticker shock. The expenses don't end there though. The PS5 Pro doesn't come with a stand nor a disc drive. The former runs at $30, while the latter runs at $80, bringing the total to $810, before tax, for some. Even at this price point though, the PS5 Pro is still a better deal than people realize.
While the difference between games running on the PS5 and PS5 Pro may not always be apparent to the naked eye, this isn't the fault of the PS5 Pro, but the diminishing returns of technological progress in the video game industry. That said, to build a PC with roughly the same capacities, you are going to spend much more than $700 or $800.
When Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter -- an expert in the field of video game tech -- was asked how much a PC equivalent to PS5 Pro would cost, Leadbetter noted it wouldn't be cheap.
"Probably a fair bit more," said Leadbetter of the hypothetical PC build. "I mean, the GPU you are going to need... if you consider a wholistic view of all the different components, the enhanced ray tracing, no AMD GPU has that at the moment. The machine learning block, no AMD GPU has that. It's almost like essentially an NVIDIA-style feature set but made by AMD. And the closest equivalent GPU you'd be looking at would be the RTX 4070. The 4060 is quite close to the base PS5, factoring out machine learning and ray tracing. So you are looking at a 4070.... the cheapest one of those is $540."
Leadbetter continued: "So beyond that, you have to get a CPU, a motherboard, memory, power supply, a case, a 2 TB SSD -- so the costs are going to ramp up.
IGN's Destin Legarie asks Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter how much an equivalent PS5 Pro performing PC would cost
— NIB (@nib95_) September 12, 2024
He says a fair bit more expensive, that no equivalent AMD GPU currently exists with its next-gen RDNA4 features. That #PS5Pro's more Nvidia like, closer to 4070 pic.twitter.com/7lW6Dp5gIK
When you take into consideration what the alternatives are, the PS5 Pro price is a great price point. The question is whether the fractional improvements are worth the extra money when the base PS5 is right there for much cheaper. This is true of all high-end gaming hardware though, including high-end gaming PCs. That said, when you consider the innards of the PS5 Pro, a $700 price point is a very fair price point. In fact, there is a case to be made it is a good deal.
