A few noob questions

[kration]

I've always fancied having a PC in the lounge/sitting room for playing games on the TV i.e. for playing my Steam games etc.

I'm not expecting to play at the highest graphic settings, but at OK settings for something like 'Assetto Corsa' for a 42"-ish TV (I'll be getting the TV later as well).

I'm tempted to build something later in the year for about the £350 mark, which seems typical for the builds on here.

So my questions are:

1 - am I being realistic for an OK-ish gaming PC at that price? (Assetto Corsa is probably my benchmark).

2 - I'm on Virgin Broadband with a wireless router. Is connecting the PC to this as simple as connecting a wi-fi phone? If not, how do I do it?

3 - What else can these PC's do apart from play games? I appreciate that this is a very open ended question but what's the potential range of uses out there for a living room PC?

 

[kration]

Cheers - I suspected I was being a bit unrealistic and that's confirmed it.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[kration]

Do you have a gaming rig elsewhere? You could build something for use with Steam Home Streaming, have your gaming rig do the grunt work and just beam the content down to the small rig on the TV.

You could do that on a low-end Kaveri APU or maybe even the cheap-as-chips AMD Kabini boards.

As far as web browsing and media playback as a HTPC you can do that no problem with cheap Kabini boards and low-end Intel i3 CPUs - they may not cut the mustard for gaming, but even the cheap stuff can be pretty powerful for playing Blu-Ray rips and Netflix streaming.

Good tip. I have a gaming PC elsewhere in the house so could use Steam Home Streaming as you suggest. Is t a bit laggy for games?

But in terms of other stuff it could do is it mainly playing movies/netflix or are there other strings to a mini-system's bow?