The video game console wars have been going on for years now: Sega vs. Nintendo, Genesis vs. Super Nintendo, Playstation vs. Nintendo 64, and now we have Xbox vs. Playstation 2. I have chosen sides in each of these battles, and the latest is no exception. I believe Microsoft Xbox to be the clearly superior machine, but Sony's Playstation 2 continues to outsell Xbox. Let's take a look at three factors that play a big role in deciding which console is right for you: System specs, game library and internet connectivity.
             The most important aspect of a video game system to me is the hardware. What can the machine do? How powerful is it? It would suck to have a $100,000 sports car with a 120 horsepower four cylinder under the hood, so lets take a look. The Xbox has a 733 MHz chip from Intel powering the machine. This is a phenomenal amount of binary crunching power in a home video game system. The graphics processor, which was developed by nvidia, is a 250 MHz custom chip named the XGPU. The Xbox has 64MB of DDR RAM running at 200MHz and a memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/sec. The machine is able to produce 125 million polygons per second and also includes a 10 GB hard drive and DVD playback.
             The Playstation 2 however, is only sporting a 300 MHz processor. The graphic rendering is handled by a 150 MHz GPU developed by Sony named the Emotion Engine. The unit has a respectable 38MB of RAM and a memory bandwidth of 3.2 GB/sec. Sony also includes DVD playback but no hard drive comes installed in the unit. In case a lot of this video game lingo is Greek to you, I am going to give you a little rule to go by: The bigger the better. The higher those numbers go, the better the performance will be. Anyone can plainly see that in hardware alone, the Xbox destroys its competition. Too bad hardware is not the only thing we must take into consideration.
             The sheer number of games available for a system can make or break it...