Playstation 3 VS. Xbox 360: Comparing Specs

As most of the fans of each systems know, Both of these machines can kick out some serious power. The hardware in these machines are equivalent to a high end gaming computer but not nearly as expensive. In the past year there has been a constant battle between microsoft and sony about who's system has better games, online play, hardware, and the list goes on. It's really a matter of personal preference on which system one person may prefer over the other.

The most important part in my opinion of a gaming system are its games. If the console doesn't have good games to utilize the extreme power of these machines? For as much as sheer power goes, The Playstation 3 tops the Xbox 360. But looking at the games that were first released with the Playstation 3 the graphics are no where near as superior as newer games on the Xbox 360. The Playstation 3 has advantages over the Xbox 360 such as backwards compatibility with all of its older generation systems ( PS1 and PS2 ) which is a very big deal fans who have played playstation since the get-go. The Xbox 360 does have quite a few advantages over the Playstation 3. The media center support with windows xp is a very big plus, and as is the integration with device connectivity. You can literally connect just about any usb device, external hard drive, Ipod or even a Sony PSP to the Xbox 360 and it will recognize it Immediately.

As far as online gameplay goes, The Xbox 360 is defiantly on the top of the market. With Xbox Live you can communicate across any game, talk to your friends while you are watching a movie and many other features that the Playstation 3 does not have. The games on Playstation have a very limited online experience and not every game is supported online. Now that Xbox 360 has offered a free 1080p upgrade to all of its customers, and also Introduced a new version of the Xbox 360 called the Xbox 360 Elite, Sony is going to have to work very hard to keep up with Microsoft and Xbox 360 in the war of gaming consoles.

The technical aspects of each systems both have their ups and downs, Here is a rundown of the specifications of each system.

Playstation 3:
_{Pricing - $499 USD for standard model, $599 for premium model.
Processor - 3.2 GHz Cell processor with 7 single threaded synergistic processing units cores.
Graphics - Nvidia Based GPU
Video Resolutions Supported - 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI Supported - Yes
Sound - 5.1-channel Dolby Digital, 7.1-channel LPCM
System Memory - 256 MB XDR-RAM Clocked @ 3.2GHz
Disc Drive - Blu-Ray
Hard Drive - 20GB and 60GB Replacable Hard drives.
USB Ports - 4
Ethernet Ports - 1 @ 1Gbps
Wireless Compatability - Bluetooth and Wi-fi
Online Play - Playstation Network, Fee's vary between games.
Backwards Compatability - Compatible with all previous Playstation games.}

Xbox 360:
_{Pricing - $299 for the Core Model, $399 for the Premium Model, $475 for the Elite Edition Model
Processor - 3.2 GHz PowerPC with 3 dual-threaded processor cores.
Graphics - ATI Based GPU
Video Resolutions Supported - 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI Supported - Only Supported with the Xbox 360 Elite Edition System, The Original Systems do not support HDMI.
Sound - 5.1-channel Dolby Digital
System Memory - 512 MB GDDR3 RAM clocked @ 700Mhz
Disc Drive - 12X dual-layer DVD Drive, HD-DVD drive offered as a $200 accessory.
Hard Drive - 20GB(Premium Edition) and 120GB(Elite Edition) Replacable Hard drives.
USB Ports - 3
Ethernet Ports - 1 @ 100Mbps
Wireless Compatability - 802.11g optional addon for $100.
Online Play - Xbox live online service. Free for silver customers and $50 a year for gold customers. Only gold customers can compete in online multiplayer gameplay.
Backwards Compatability - Compatible with most previous Xbox games.}

As you can see both of the systems defiantly have their similarities and differences. In my opinion I prefer the Xbox 360 because of Xbox live. I have been an online gamer for years and Microsoft defiantly knows what there doing when it comes to multiplayer online games. The Playstation is a very impressive system, But I think it may take awhile for them to prove that they can surpass the popularity of the Xbox 360, Which i think is very unlikely.