Comments on: HP’s new Firebird 803: a revolution waiting to happen?

By: hp gaming

hp gaming — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:50:41 +0000

hp gaming…

It’s only Wednesday and already I’m looking for hp gaming to make me feel better. I found ‘HP Pavilion Elite M9500F Desktop PC (2.4 GHz AMD Phenom X4 9750 Quad ….’ And I’m looking forward again, thanks!…

By: josef

josef — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:59:14 +0000

I think this is the result of a turn the gaming market took a couple of years ago, when the trend became to port xbox360 titles for pc instead of building them exclusively for pc. it’s actually a production process that makes quilte a lot of sense too, actually. primarily, games for pc are a lot cheaper than their console counterparts in the store, so the producers make more money of the console games. Since most games are console ports, system requirements don’t usually become as harsh as they could be, had the game been developed primarily for PC or exclusively for PC. This opens the market for a gaming computer that don’t really require that much performance, since almost no games require more power.

Personally, i would never buy that system as a gaming computer, but i would definitely consider it for a media PC to hook up to my 47in TV and play HD movies on.

By: Usman

Usman — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:17:47 +0000

It’s sad, but I think that pc games are wilting away now. Not that their time is over, just that until the issue of piracy is resolved (to some degree) developers just won’t feel comfortable enough putting games out there. Look at Gears of War 2.

Secondly, just like you said in your article, pc gaming is expensive. When compared to buying a console, the prices are incomparable. Considering a PS3 has a blue-ray drive, plays all of the games it likes and come set up and ready to do the job, owning a pc seems troublsome and expensive. With my PC I’ve had to worry about drivers, bsods, hardware incompatibility, shutting down background tasks to improve performance and so many more things. And then there’s the price. buying parts individually meant in total I forked out just over a thousand pounds. And I have what you would call a mid-range rig.
With the same amount of money, I would have afforded a high end lcd television, sound system and console, not to mention some games, which I seem to find increasingly difficult to find for PC.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:55:38 +0000

Powerful PC’s are still needed for tasks like High Definition video editing. My Quad Core machine with 12gb RAM struggles with HD Video editing. I’ll wait a year and then upgrade to the latest high power machine

By: muck

muck — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:09:52 +0000

PC gaming goes through phases. When the next gen consoles come out, the graphics match the PCs and it feels like PC gaming is over but a year later the PC is off doing better things and leaving the consoles behind again. Now days the big killer is illegal games and a complete lack of ideas. First person shooters and driving games. DO you remember when there were flight sims and Railroad Tycoon. There’s far too many similar games for consoles. Thank god for Total War though. That will keep me gaming on the PC. Now when will the Core i7 come down in price so that I can get my next rig!!

By: Mike Jennings

Mike Jennings — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:43:25 +0000

Jefferson – thanks for your comment. I do agree with some of your points – I certainly think that there’s a place for a very enclosed and non-upgradeable PC of the likes that HP has designed. We tend to think of them as small, low-power devices that are good enough for surfing the net but not much more than that. If HP could provide a real powerhouse that can play games then I could see machines like this growing in popularity. It’s definitely a novel approach and I sort of hope it pays off for them.

Not sure I entirely agree with online gaming being easier on consoles, though – Steam has made things pretty much effortless, and I’ve rarely had problems going back to the days of the original Unreal Tournament. On the whole I think that consoles and PCs are both very easy to play online with problems few and far between. I know that I’ve had far less lag playing Team Fortress 2 than I have playing Warhawk.

High Definition is great for console gaming, I do agree – although I think that my 22in TFT does just as good a job thanks to the resolution it offers. I know that when I’m playing PC games I’m far closer to the screen than when playing on my PS3.

Plus first-person shooters and strategy games are just far, far better on PC than PS3 :p as well as the life-swallowing Football Manager, of course!

Thanks for your comment,

Mike

By: jefferson117

jefferson117 — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:15:08 +0000

Interesting article and I do think there is a place for a PC that is not upgradeable and relatively closed such as media centres that can game.

However, I think a major contributing factor to the decline are game consoles. As a former PC gamer myself, there were two main factors that differentiated PC’s from previous consoles: higher definition and on-line gaming. With the advent of XBox 360 and PS3 combined with very good on-line services (especially XBox), both of these issues are now addressed in a format where you can forget about instability and upgrading.

I think there is still a hard-core minority who like to push the envelope with a PC and prefer keyboard control but the majority would prefer their HD gaming experience in a no-fuss, 40+ inch format.