136 PCWorld DECEMBER 2020HERE’S HOW BUILD A PS5 OR XBOX SERIES X PC
Due to the lingering headache around DRM
protection, we’ve passed on a 4K Blu-ray drive for
this build.SGX was discovered to have security flaws
(go.pcworld.com/scfl) earlier this
year. Intel has been
addressing them with
patches, but sticking with
AMD bypasses all that
risk—after all, you will be
using this computer for
more than just gaming. (Plus,
staying with Team Red preserves PCIe 4.0
SSD support.) Using a 4K Blu-ray drive
without SGX hardware isn’t an option,
either. We prefer suggesting build lists that
stay on the up-and-up, and for that scenario
to work, you have to circumvent DRM.
So we’re compromising and downgrading
to standard Blu-ray, thus making nobody
happy...but we’ll have a dang drive at least. I
know, console fans: This move proves that the
Xbox Series X is superior. And yes, PC builders,
we could just skip an optical drive all together
because “no one” uses them (outside of
people on PCWorld’s The Full Nerd Discord
server [go.pcworld.com/ndds]).
The short of it is, add another $195 to
swap in a 4K Blu-ray drive (LG WH16NS60
[go.pcworld.com/wh16]) plus compatible
CPU (Core i7-10700K [go.pcworld.
com/107k]), motherboard (ASRock Z490
Phantom Gaming 4SR [go.pcworld.com/
z490]), and Wi-Fi card (TP-Link Archer
TX3000E [go.pcworld.com/tx30]) for optical
drive parity with the Xbox Series X. Subtract
$55 if you prefer to align with modern PCbuilding trends. We’ll revisit this question
later, after Intel’s 11th-generation Rocket Lake
desktop CPUs launch.
We’ll also revisit the use of an RTX 3070.
For the time being, our two next-gen console
builds share the same GPU, which shouldn’t
matter since it’s a placeholder to meet our
baseline of 4K/60. Again, we don’t know
what exactly to expect from Radeon RX 6000
graphics cards; we don’t know what lower-
tier cards are coming; and most importantly,
we don’t actually know yet the concrete
performance differences that exist between
the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Eurogamer, which
does superb comparisons of that very nature,
points out in its review (go.pcworld.com/
nogm) that it hasn’t even received a single
game than can be played on both systems yet.
So don’t worry console fans, I haven’t
forgotten that the PS5 has fewer GPU
compute units than the Xbox Series X. We’ll
just have to tackle that later.