PC gaming doesn't have to be expensive.

This is a great article on building a gaming PC on the cheap. It is a very good read. They do a great job explaining why they picked certain parts and when moving to the next budget scale why they changed certain parts over others. Of course this article does assume you are going to use your existing monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

What is cool is they start at $500, which includes the price of Windows 7 OEM, and work up through a couple of different budgets. The $500 system is a decent system. It would be a great college system but probably not something an average home user would want. But it is a gaming PC, aren't gaming PCs generally better than what most home users want? No, not these days. These days with everyone using digital video cameras a home user wants a beefy system to process their home videos to create their DVDs. The $500 system is great for video editting except it doesn't have enough ram or hard drive space.

This article somewhat proves my point that creating a gaming PC isn't that expensive. On average people get a new PC every 5 years. That's about as often as someone gets a new gaming console. This is why I say when comparing the costs of PC gaming to consoles you should compare the extra cost of making your PC - that you are going to buy any way - into a gaming PC. I don't think it is appropiate to compare the entire cost of the PC to consoles since you are going to spend money on a PC anyways.

The speed of PCs have hit a plateau. Instead of making them faster now they are making them more efficient and with more cores. Think of it like a pipe carrying water. Right now the CPU makers are having a tough time making the water pump push out water quicker. So what they are doing is adding more pipes. But they are also finding ways to pump the water with less energy. Since this has been going on for the last couple of years even the budgets PCs are pretty powerful now. All they really need is a decent video card and some more memory for gaming.