A powerful personal computer with SteamOS or Windows 8.1: Build your own multimedia center! Each modern TV unit has an HDMI input and can also serve as a monitor. Why not place a PC in the living room and connect it to the TV?
Mini ITX components as a base
In response to this question, we've put together a configuration for a compact, powerful, and quiet living room PC that you can build. With a component price of almost 1000 euros, it is significantly more expensive than a game console, but also more powerful and versatile. Playing in full-HD resolution is no problem at all.
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The compact and living-room-compatible design we are looking for can only be achieved by using mini-ITX components on the chassis and mainboard. In the case, we chose the Coolermaster Elite 130. With a size of 240 x 207 x 399 mm, the affordable 45-euro case offers space for a long graphics card and a conventional ATX power supply.
Affordable processor and powerful GeForce GTX graphics card
In addition, a 5-1 / 4-inch bay, for example, is available for the installation of a Blu-ray drive, and you get two USB 3.0 ports on the front of the enclosure to connect superspeed devices, such as external hard drives. For the power supply, we decided to buy the cooler Master G550M: it costs $ 50 in retail.
256-GB SSD as mass storage
The only 170 x 170 mm small board is based on the Z87 chipset from Intel and is therefore designed for powerful core processors. On the board is a WLAN adapter integrated, which already supports the 802.11ac standard for a very fast wireless network. With its two external antennas and a corresponding AC router as an alternative, the board can receive and transmit data with up to theoretical 867 Mbps and transmit, not far from the GBit LAN.
For connection to a GBit LAN, a killer E2200 GBit LAN adapter with particularly low latencies is available. This makes a good figure even during an excursion to a LAN party. Bluetooth is also supported by the 150-Euro motherboard. The memory is generously dimensioned with eight GB in the form of two Corsair DDR3-1600 modules of the Vengeance series.
As gaming and multimedia are the main focus, we chose the processor for an Intel Core i3-4330. The dual-core processor with 3.5 GHz clock frequency and hyperthreading belongs to the current Haswell generation. The cooler Seidon 120 from Coolermaster ensures that the processor does not get too warm.
The Intel Core i3-4330, which we selected, is relatively cheap at 115 Euros, but still fast enough to keep up with a strong graphics card like the MSI GTX760 OC Twin Frozr. Under the cooler with a quiet double fan, a Nvidia GTX 760 with Kepler architecture and two GB of GDDR5 memory are installed as a graphics chip.
In the Nvidia chip take a total of 1152 Cuda cores the computing work, with the MSI card it overclocked with up to 1.15 GHz in the boost mode. The card is at 230 euros the most expensive single components, but in a gaming PC is synonymous decisive for the game pleasure.
We use the new Plextor SSD PX-256M6S as a mass storage device for operating systems and games. The 2.5-inch SSD with SATA-3 interface provides 256 GB of space for operating system and games, with 120 Euro it is quite cheap. We did not use the 5.25 inch drive slot in the Mini ITX case with our example calculator. It can use either an optical drive or an additional hard disk. For the installation of games, a low-cost DVD burner for 18 euros is enough. If you want to use the computer also as a 3D-capable Blu-ray player, you can access a Blu-ray combo drive for about 55 euros >
Alternatively you can also in the case internally next to the SSD still a 3.5-inch hard drive. Naturally, external hard disks can also be used as an additional data memory, which is not yet possible or only to a limited extent with the PS4 and with the XBox. With our computer, external HDDs of any size can be easily connected via USB 3.0 or eSATA.
Even if many players probably would like to keep Windows 7 gladly the loyalty, we recommend as operating system Windows 8.1. It is more modern and faster than Windows 7. In addition, the new Windows is also more suitable for the living room. With a compact wireless keyboard, the Windows startup screen is easy to use, and there are now a lot of nice casual games and multimedia apps as an app.
The company Valve has steamed with the largest online provider of computer games. With SteamOS, the company wants to provide the operating system itself. The reason for this is likely to be primarily the fact that Valve wants to make it independent from Microsoft, the Valve boss Gabe Newell probably sees the Windows Store as a threat to their own business model in Windows 8
Windows 8.1 or SteamOS
In addition, it is rumored that Valve wants to enter the lucrative streaming business with music, movies and TV shows. And, of course, a living room computer is ideally suited, on which only the own operating system SteamOS runs. Valve itself will not offer any machines with pre-installed SteamOS.
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