PlayStation 3 Review and Comparison

An in depth article explaining the reasons why or why not to buy the PlayStation 3, including comparisons with other top of the range consoles. Hopefully this will give you the knowledge to make an informed decision on which may be the best to buy depending on what you're looking for. I will be giving the information up to date to this day.

I will base my review on 6 individual points, these will be:

- Hardware

- GPU

- Looks

- Disks

- Features

- Games

As the Nintendo Wii is a console manly used for family games and not suited for hardcore gamers, I will only compare the PS3 and the Xbox 360, When I refer to the Xbox 360, I mean the original not the new Xbox 360 S.

To start, the hardware, the PS3 Slim and original are both powered by a CPU called the Cell Broadband Engine which has a total of eight cores which run at 3.2GHz each, with six of them used for games, one of them used for security and the operating system (OS) and the eighth core isn't used. The PS3 Slim either comes with a 120GB, 160GB, 250GB or a 320GB hard drive. As a comparison to the 360, the CPU used is called the PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon which has three cores running at 3.2GHz each. The 360 comes with either 256MB, 512MB or 4GB of on board memory and a 20GB, 60GB, 120GB or 250GB removable hard drive.  

Now on to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), the GPU used in the PS3 original and slim is called the nVidia RSX running at 550 MHz, It has 256MB of RAM that runs 1.3GHz which is solely dedicated to the GPU. The 360 GPU, the ATI Xenos, runs at 500 MHz. It has 512MB of RAM which is also shared with the CPU. This RAM runs at 800MHz over the whole system.

The next category, looks, really depends on your personal taste, for me, I think the PS3 looks pretty good and I also think the 360 looks good as well but both have different aspects which may or may not be aesthetically pleasing to you.

 Now, the discs, the PS3 uses Blu-ray discs which can hold up to 50GB (Single Sided) per one disc as apposed to the format used by the 360 which are DVD disks that can hold a maximum of 8.5GB (Single Sided).

This next section is about the range of features available. The PS3 Slim has many features, these include, 2 USB Ports, PlayStation Network (PSN), Blu-ray/DVD/CD player, PlayStation Eye and Bravia Sync XMB Control (Allows you to control the PS3's XMB via a Sony Bravia TV using its controller). The features that the 360 have are as follows, 3 USB Ports, Kinect, Xbox Live, Interchangeable face plates and Media Center Extender.

Click the link below for even more information
Sony PlayStation 3 Slim Console (250GB Model)