Both the PS3 and Xbox have their pluses and minuses. Much of the choice between them boils down to personal taste and what you really are going to use it the most for.

Gaming has evolved a great deal in the last few years, and several game systems now double as Blu-ray players and as products with which you can actually stream all sorts of Internet media content. The very best gaming consoles as of early 2012 are detailed below.

Sony PS3

The PS3 has come a long way in three years. It now starts at a reasonable $299 and has a more compact case and is much quieter. Most of the games that you play on the PS3 now are in HD, and the interface is quite simple to operate. It has a Blu-ray and DVD player built into it. Wi-Fi is built-in and it also has a large hard drive. Additionally, it has output in HDMI and 1080p video.

However, the PS3 doesn’t have support for PS2 games and it doesn’t have an infrared port. So remotes that are not Bluetooth aren’t supported. We also discover that the online gaming and media options are not nearly as good as the Xbox, but the PS3 is getting better and better.

This device is 33% smaller and 36% lighter than the old PS3s. We find it to be a more pleasing gaming console than anything Sony has come out with before.

You can buy a PS3 today with a 160 GB hard drive or a 320 GB hard drive.

Microsoft Xbox 360

The brand new Xbox is thinner and is much quieter when it is running. Furthermore, it has a better cooling fan and a 250GB hard drive. It has Wi-Fi built in and a whopping 5 USB ports. One thing we have really noticed with this updated game console is how quiet it truly is. When it is idle, the 360 is just about noiseless, and when the hard drive is running, you can hardly hear it. This is much better than the old 360s.

The 360 prior to now has suffered from what some call ‘red ring of death,’ which has caused some people a lot of problems. The earlier 360s were not great at heat dissipation. This caused the unit burning out after a year or two. Microsoft claims to have fixed this issue in the new, slim devices. We also don’t like that you cannot swap out the hard drive if you wish. Sony permits users to do this with PS3s.

We do find the 360 to be tops in online gaming and streaming of media, however.