It's very mature of you to at least acknowledge the jealousy! :D

But hey it's ok. Two years ago after building/purchasing/upgrading a couple servers and laptops, I finally decided it was time to build myself a gaming rig with my own hard-earned money. It can hold its own against consoles, but you know what? I'm still pretty flippin jealous of everyone's quad Titan X's and dual 295Xs! That doesn't go away.

Sure, PC gaming can look definitively better if you have the coin. But that's just not in the cards for me or you right now, albeit for slightly different reasons. It's worth getting excited over the future though, because you know that someday you'll jump into PCMR world and have Titan-class performance in your future rig for cheaper, with nextgen graphics and games.

Also remember this subreddit is skewed towards the benefits of PC gaming. You look around and what do you see? Everyone showing off the many hundreds of dollars it took to ascend into PCMR with their shiny new toys. What you don't see as much are all the downsides we willingly face, such as:

• The rather high entry cost ($500 gets you in, but you'll realistically be barely keeping up with console performance... more on that later)
• System maintenance (Windows Updates and/or Linux configuration timesinks are inevitable)
• Dying components (Your GPU died? Get a new one! RAM was DOA? Return it! Also your box is basically unusable while you remedy this. Oh and Newegg charges 15% restocking fees because they are greedy morons)
• Moore's Law (That shiny Titan you just paid $1k will sell for $300 next year. And now you're jealous of whatever the new 2016 Titan is because it's cheaper and 40% faster)
• Settings tweaks (I haven't ever been immersed in the first 20 minutes of a game because I'm constantly tweaking graphics settings between pretty and playable)
• Lack of optimization! This one deserves a short paragraph.

Consoles are great for developers because the hardware is guaranteed to never really change. So they can do all sorts of fancy optimization. Check out what the Oblivion looked like versus Skyrim on the 360. Developers now know how to extract every ounce of power from the 360/PS3 but are still working on optimizing the Xbox One/PS4. It won't be a world of difference but it'll be something.

An ugly truth is that on PC we have a little more driver overhead to make up for a diverse hardware ecosystem. Typically we can overcome this just by throwing more beefy components at the problem, but ultimately you often will get a couple fps worse performance on identical-to-console hardware.

My point is that you will have to spend a bit more than the cost of the Xbox One on a gaming rig today to get your 1080p@60fps with few stutters or framerate dips (ie: better overall gaming experience) than a console, solely because consoles are all preoptimized to some extent so they work fluidly on the hardware they have. But by the time you hit high school, the same amount of money will go a LOT further.

Ok that was a long rant that didn't prove anything other than you are stuck with a pink Accord. There will always be people with faster and shinier cars, but it doesn't mean yours is junk. It means when you actually get to choose a new car down the road, you'll know how much better it will be. But at least you get to drive with your friends in the meantime.

If you really want a PCMR rig, save up for more than a toaster! While difficult, it feels great knowing I chose and paid for every gig of RAM, every gig of SSD NAND, every GPU shader and CPU core myself :)