Looking at the new breed of consoles, the ps4 is better but has a shit pad. The x bone worries me with potential drm changes. So I reckon a combined htpc /gaming rig is he answer.

I've already got a wireless connector for my 360 pads, so at least the input side of things is taken care of.

What spec and budget should I be looking at? Our TV is only 720p, although I presume that'll change at some point in the far future. Quiet would be a bonus too.

So no thoughts on what spec for gaming these days? You mean I have to research this shit myself? :((

Any quad core i5, GTX 760, some RAM.

(Can go with AMD GPU if you've got no intentions of ever running SteamOS).

Is it worth looking at AMD CPUs? Or are they very bad these days?

They're worth it at the very budget end of the spectrum I think. But for a gaming PC I'd just go with an i5, they have the right balance of power and features and AMD doesn't really have anything to compete at that level.

For GPUs, if you're definitely always going to be running Windows then an AMD GPU will probably be marginally better value for money. But I cannot overstate how shit their drivers are for Linux (you'll get 50% of the performance you'd expect on Windows at best. Usually closer to 10-20%. Whereas Nvidia's Linux drivers have parity with Windows). If you've got any vague ideas about maybe using SteamOS one day, stick with Nvidia.

Amd gpus seem to have loads of irritations in Windows and games too. Although I gather the xbone and ps4 use them so in the near future all the ports may work better with them than nvidia, bit of a reversal.

Last gen used AMD too (on the xbox at least) and it didn't help. Consoles just use them cos they're cheaper I think, same reason low-end gaming laptops do.

If they actually see Gallium through things may change but... yeah, not holding my breasts.

Cool. I will start watching out for deals then.


How many gigabytes tbh is normal these days? I have 8 tbh in my laptop. And a GT 750m. And an i5. Hang on, why don't I just get an hdmi cable?

You can get by on 4, 8's ideal.

On a slightly different note, I nearly shit myself with glee yesterday.

I have an (old) gaming rig, Core 2 Duo but with plenty of RAM and a decent graphics card...it'll play everything I'm interested in (strategy games, Civ and the like). This is upstairs in an office and I rarely get to play games these days. I've recently reinstalled this PC from scratch, installed Steam for the first time in about 2 years, an noticed a feature I'd not heard of. In-home streaming.

I have a Lenovo Q190 running Windows 8.1 & XBMC as a HTPC in the living room, so I thought I'd give this a go...now my main machine is below Valve's recommended specs (Quad) but what the hell, I'm not playing fast-paced racing games and the like, and I have a wired (over powerline) network.

So, last night, I was playing X-Com on my dirty great big telly and it was bloody brilliant...had a crack at Anno 2070 as well, and although I kept getting slow encode warnings, and the occassionally blocky/fuzzy image, it was perfectly playable. I love this feature, it's the shizzle.

I don't know why I have said all this.

Well I didn't know about in-home streaming. Shame it's now working on Linux yet.

It may well be something that gets me back into some gaming.

Everything I've read says it's now working on linux...haven't got a linux box to test it though.

But no 64bit client :(

Means I can't use an OpenElec system as the frontend.

So... this could be quite interesting if it works as seamlessly as they imply. I've got gigabit ports in the office and next to the TV, so that part's sorted. All I really need is a quiet PC capable of handling the TV-side stuff - I wonder if one of the Intel i3 or i5 NUCs would do that well enough? I do have my current Q9550 PC (due for an upgrade very soon) which I could re-purpose, but I'm not sure how quiet I could make it, and it's a full-size ATX motherboard.

I'll have a look but isn't it just a case of decoding a video (or similar) at the client end? So nothing too beefy would be required.

I imagine an i3 or i5 NUC would be fine (that's total speculation though).

Anything that can decode h.264 should be fine on the client end. My netbook works fine (over wifi, amazingly, though I hear wired is really recommended).

But yeah, home streaming is pretty cool. And you can stream anything, doesn't have to be a game and it doesn't have to be on Steam. You can add any program to Steam and then stream that.

How's input dealt with?

Steams deals with it, sent over the network. There'll be some input lag of course but when testing it I didn't notice any. It's probably less than you get from using an LCD.

But you're still using an LCD (or does steam beam it straight into your BRAIN?).

I am still using an LCD yeah. I was just putting the amount of input lag into a made up context which I know very little about :Y