Even if you are not a video gamer, you must have heard about PlayStation 3. Nobody could have missed it, with hoardings and ads all over the place; there was no way that not anyone could have heard about it. Touted as the ultimate entertainment system, let us have a look at what makes it so great.

Swanky Design
The first thing that attracts you is its swanky design. It has very clean lines and the curves are even more pleasing. It looks sleek and futuristic. Its glossy plastic finish will definitely compliment your high-definition television. However, the only problem that you might face is that its glossy finish has a tendency to collect fingerprints. Therefore, if you have small kids around your house, you would have trouble keeping it fingerprint free.

Its swanky design is backed by some very cool features. First, you can play all games in high-definition. To video gamers, this is one-step closure to reality games. PlayStation 3 uses Blu-ray discs as its media format. In addition, it is backward compatible, which means that you can also play your DVDs and earlier version of PlayStation also.

Connections
If you look at the back of your PlayStation 3, you will find an Ethernet port for hooking up the PS3 to your home network. There is an AV output for analog audio and video. The best feature is the HDMI port, which allows you to connect to your high definition television, via a digital interface.

Now, let us look underneath that smooth and sleek design. PlayStation 3 comes with very good hardware. Its Cell Broadband Engine CPU was developed in collaboration with Toshiba and IBM. The Cell chip runs at 3.2 GHz and consists of Power Processing Element and Synergistic Processing Elements. Moreover, PlayStation 3 has 256MB of XDR DRAM. Rambus specifically developed the XDR, for high bandwidth environment like PS3.

Hard Drive
Buyers in US and Japan have the choice of choosing between a 60GB hard drive and a 20GB hard drive. The best part about the hard disk drive of a PlayStation 3 is that it is upgradeable. Therefore, in the future, if you are not satisfied with 60GB of storage space, you can replace the drive with any 2.5 in SATA hard disk.

Now let us talk about its controller. PlayStation 3 SixAxis controller is very different from its predecessors. For one thing, SixAxis is a wireless controller that connects to your console, using Bluetooth. Furthermore, you do not have to regularly replace its AA batteries, as it is a rechargeable unit. It offers 30 hours of playtime between charges. Another great thing about its SixAxis controller is that it is very light.

It is evident that PlayStation 3 is a very powerful system. With its excellent graphics and audio quality, enormous horsepower, and other multimedia features, PlayStation 3 is truly a unique entertainment system that has been designed to revolutionize the way we play games.