It’s in response to a question: “What are your thoughts on how PC gaming is dying?”

My first thought: way to pick a loaded question. But then oft-quoted analyst Michael Patcher goes on to demonstrate his ignorance, by saying: “Nobody has a PC that’s faster than a PS3.”

Say what?

Patcher launches into this chewy tidbit focusing on the CPU, rather than the platform. The PS3 has certain computational strengths because of the cell processor, but it’s something of a CPU dead end. IBM recently announcing it was ending its own development efforts on the Cell. As Intel moves forward into 32nm, with the upcoming Gultown, Arrandale and Clarkdale CPUs, the PC processor is still advancing.

The ignorance doesn’t end there. The commentators throw around other juicy bits of misinformation, like “dual quad Pentium 3.2…” “ … that costs $2,000.”

But the PC isn’t just the CPU. Any PC consists of memory, storage, chipsets… and, of course, the graphics card.

Right now, I can build an $800 PC with an AMD Radeon HD 5850 that’s arguably substantially more powerful than the PS3. You can even see it in games that run on both platforms, where I can get higher, smoother frame rates in titles like Borderlands and Dragon Age at higher resolutions than I can on a console.

There are the logical fallacies, like dismissing Starcraft II because it’s irrelevant. After all, “Anything that’s gonna sell in Asia and anything that’s gonna have a subscription” doesn’t count in Patcher’s book.

In other words, a data point that doesn’t agree with the premise isn’t valid. And neither are Asian gamers or MMOs.

At times, it also just gets insulting, like the idea that “the gamer is the guy who’s gonna play by himself.”

Good job dismissing woman gamers and all those people playing online. Say, isn’t one of the Xbox 360’s main value proposition its strength in online gaming?

And to think people pay these guys for their insights.

I’m not going to argue the strengths and merits of console gaming versus PC gaming. That’s a topic for another, more lengthy discussion. Rather, my point is that if you’re getting paid for your insights and knowledge, maybe it’s a good idea to have those insights be, you know, accurate.

Or am I asking too much?