Xbox Series X Now Sells for $799.99, but a Comparable PC Still Costs More

Microsoft's Xbox Series X now sells for $799.99, according to Engadget's price comparison analysis. Engadget estimates that a PC with similar capability, built from new parts with Windows and a controller added, costs about $1,200. Buying only the main components for that machine comes to roughly $730.

The console launched in November 2020 at $499.99. Prices rose again on August 1, the third US increase since the start of last year. Microsoft attributed the increases to a components crisis, stating that memory and storage prices had risen by more than 2.5 times.

The Series X uses an eight-core AMD Zen 2 processor running at 3.8GHz, paired with a custom RDNA 2 graphics processor (GPU) that has 52 compute units running at 1.825GHz. AMD rates the GPU at 12 teraflops, a measure of theoretical peak calculation speed. Memory is 16GB of GDDR6 on a 320-bit bus, shared between the system and graphics, and storage is a 1TB NVMe SSD. Sony's PlayStation 5 uses the same eight Zen 2 cores and RDNA 2 graphics architecture.

The Series X supports DirectX 12 Ultimate features, including raytracing (simulating light paths for more realistic lighting), variable rate shading and mesh shaders. Its display feature set includes 4K output at up to 120FPS, with supported content and display required, plus HDMI 2.1 and Dolby Vision gaming. Networking is 802.11ac dual-band wireless and 1Gbps Ethernet.

In 2020, Microsoft positioned the console against a Gears 5 benchmark that Digital Foundry had been shown, in which the Series X ran at roughly the level of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080. The console was previously known as Project Scarlett. Microsoft has also said AMD powers the Series X|S and will power upcoming Xbox hardware.

On the PC side, the used market offers a sense of what that 2080-class performance now costs. On resale marketplace Jawa, the RTX 2080 averaged $195 over the past 12 months, and the RTX 2070 Super averaged $199. The RTX 3060 Ti averages $223, and AMD's RX 6700 XT averages about $260. New, PC Gamer's price tracker listed the RTX 5050 at $310 on sale and Intel's 12GB Arc B580 at $330 as of October 8.

The cost comparison has shifted considerably. When PCWorld tested a matching PC in 2020, its total came to $1,559, a gap of roughly $1,060 over the console's price at that time. Engadget puts the gap today at about $415. Tech Yahoo, in a September 29 piece, put the cost of an equivalent PC in the region of $800 to $1,000, a lower range than Engadget's estimate.

The broader context here is how each price is set. A console's retail price is a single decision by the platform owner, and Microsoft has tied its recent increases to memory and storage costs. A PC's price is the sum of separate component markets, where DRAM, NAND and GPU prices move independently and buyers can choose which parts to defer. The memory and storage pressure Microsoft described affects both sides of the comparison. A builder can absorb it by swapping components, while a console buyer generally cannot.

In my view, the number that matters most for the expert reader is less the headline gap than the spread within the PC market itself. Used GPUs from the previous generation now sell for less than new budget cards, which makes the upgrade decision harder to model with a single price point. Whether the component squeeze eases will determine whether either platform's price returns toward its launch-era level. Neither the console nor the PC path has a clear cost advantage at every budget, and the choice depends on what the buyer already owns.