Living Room Gaming PC

[sparkymark75]

I’m not familiar with all the brands of SFF PC cases so I’m looking for some advice. I’m looking to build my wife a gaming PC for the living room. It will be used for games like the Sims, Cities Skylines, etc

Im looking for something that’s maybe Xbox One sized, horizontal rather than vertical layout. The quieter the better also.

My own PC is an NR200 so I’m used to building (smallish) PCs but just not up on the latest case brands. My biggest issue is going to be a GPU. Do you think the latest Intel CPUs with an iGPU will be good enough to game on?

 

[sparkymark75]

@sparkymark75

The problem is going to be stock. A Ryzen 3400G would be plenty for those games at 1080p. But good luck finding one at a sane price. Stick that in an ASRock Desk Mini and you'd have a great tiny system. Intel would be stretching it TBH. Their most powerful iGPU is ~65% of the power of the 3400G.

For something more powerful, and assuming you want a console-style case, your main options are:

Fractal Design Node 202
Silverstone Raven series
Sliger Console or Conswole
Raijintek Pan
Dr Zaber Sentry
Skyreach 4 Mini

Some of those cases are really expensive though. Might be worth checking the member's market, as someone was advertising the Dr Zaber Sentry 2.0 last week. Excellent case for this sort of build, and used pricing is a bit more sane.

For GPUs, the lowest tier ones (RX 550, 560, GTX 1050) can be picked up for relatively sane prices and would do for now. They're a decent step up over a 3400G.

Thanks. After doing some research yesterday, I was leaning towards the Node 202. I have a spare i7 8700 lying about so I might use that and just get a GPU (which will be the hardest part). The TV it'll be plugged into is 4k so I either run it at 4k or output at 1080p and let the TV upscale.

 

[sparkymark75]

Could consider a Intel NUC 11 Enthusiast with its mobile RTX 2060, about £1000 with installed RAM and SSD. Its very compact and a very good media player as well with the 11th Gen CPU

Nice little machine that. Didn't realise the Intel NUCs had progressed this much. I'm a bit too far down the road with purchasing parts for this build but thanks for the suggestion.

 

[sparkymark75]

If you can find a decent entry level GPU then I found the i5-9400F (6 core) is a very good CPU to build a system around as it's just over £100. I've paired one with an inexpensive H310M micro-ATX motherboard and RX5600 XT GPU I've been keeping as a spare. Was looking at mini-ITX but with a SFX PSU and case it was starting to cost a silly amount.

So far I've managed to obtain; Asus ROG Strix B360-I motherboard, Corsair Vengeance LPX 16Gb DDR4 memory, Fractal Node 202 case, Fractal 450W SFX PSU and a Scythe Big Shuriken 2 Rev B CPU cooler all for under £260. I already have the i7 8700 CPU, just need a GPU and an SSD.