iPhone X price sparks several 'just buy a PC' recommendations

The iPhone X will feature better graphics processing capabilities than its smaller iPhone counterparts, for a price of 9.Reuters/Stephen Lam

Hot on the heels of the launch for their latest iPhone iterations, iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, Apple is back at it again, keeping the pressure on the smartphone market as it announces iPhone X, to be released a few months after its smaller brothers.

The said phone, also read as "iPhone ten," will boast a staggering price tag of $999, and that is only for the 64-gigabyte (GB) version of the device. Users who may want a bigger storage space will have to pay the price premium of $1,149 for the 256 GB model. This price, according to PC Gamer, is actually enough for a high-end gaming machine.

Much of the cost of the iPhone X was due to the A11 System on a Chip (SoC) incorporating the first Apple-designed graphics processing unit (GPU) in a phone. Apple claims that this GPU is just as fast as the previous A10 SoC while using only half of its power. This and the nearly edge-to-edge display of the iPhone X make it a graphical processing powerhouse.

However, if users are mostly paying for graphics, they might as well buy a high-end gaming PC instead. As confirmed by both PC Gamer and Tech Radar, $1000 can get the best in graphics processing for a PC. 

PC Gamer's system build features an Intel Core i5-7400 processor for $174, an MSI B250 PC Mate for the motherboard costing $80, for the memory, an Adata XPG Z1 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4-2666 for $70, a Seagate FireCuda 1 (terabyte) TB 3.5" 7200RPM SSHD for storage at $70, a Corsair Carbide 100R casing for $50, a Rosewill Capstone 550W 80 Plus Gold power supply unit for $40, and the magnum opus of the build, an MSI GeForce GTX 1080 8 GB Duke 8G OC for $510.

Tech Radar's has considerably weaker component choice with an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Ryzen 7 1700 for the processor and an Nvidia EVGA GTX 1060 for the GPU, but nonetheless, both builds actually trump the iPhone X's graphics capability with the same price tag. Users looking to shave down a few hundred bucks on the price can also go for less powerful components, and the build would still be better than iPhone X in all aspects except for portability.

All components are available and priced using the online store equivalents at the time of writing and are available for viewing at the PC Gamer and Tech Radar websites.