Living Room Media PC with Occasional Gaming - around £500?

spaceman763 · 10 Dec 2013 at 11:39

Hi All

I’m new to the forum so first of would like to say Hi.

I’ve been tinkering with the idea of building a dedicated PC for my living room in a HTPC style case. Main use will be for watching 1080p / 3D Blu-ray mkv’s outputted to a 7.1 AV Receiver and then a projector.

Not been much of a gamer but would like to get into Sim Racing games such as Assetto Corsa or F1 2013. I’ll definitely not be playing FPS games at ultra high resolutions.

With my moderate gaming requirement I am hoping I can stick to a budget of £500 but if necessary can spend a bit extra. I’ll use an existing 1TB hard drive and have a copy of Windows 7 but would like to put in a 120GB SSD for the OS drive.

Would be great if the unit is relatively silent and has some upgrade path just incase I decide to beef it up in future.

Been doing a lot of reading over the past week but still unsure on the parts. Can anyone kindly recommend a spec?

Thanks

spaceman763 · 12 Dec 2013 at 11:43

Just bumping my original post. Would be great if someone can assist.

Thanks

mickyflinn · 12 Dec 2013 at 12:29

Do you need a blu ray drive ? or a specific size case depending on where your going to place it.

spaceman763 · 12 Dec 2013 at 15:22

To tell the truth this machine will only be playing movies ripped on my main desktop I wont be needing a blu ray drive. Although would like for it to have a DVD drive at least to install software but I guess i can always use an external DVD drive for this.

Case wise, it doesn't need to be super small form, anything the height an AV Receiver is fine as this would fit nicely in my AV unit. Thinking along the lines of a Silverstone Grandia GD05 or a Silverstone Sugo SG05 but am flexible based on the advice i receive.

mickyflinn · 12 Dec 2013 at 19:48

YOUR BASKET
1 x AMD A10-6800K Black Edition 4.10GHz (Socket FM2) APU Richland Quad Core Processor (AD680KWOHLBOX) £109.99
1 x Silverstone Grandia GD05 Desktop HTPC Case - Black (SST-GD05B USB3.0) £79.99
1 x Samsung 120GB SSD 840 SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TD120BW) £73.99
1 x Asus HD 6670 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £71.99
1 x TeamGroup Vulcan ORANGE 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit (TLAD38G2400HC11CDC01) £55.99
1 x Gigabyte F2A88XM-HD3 AMD A88X (Socket FM2+) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard £52.99
1 x Corsair Builder Series CX 430w Modular '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (CP-9020058-UK) £37.99
1 x Pioneer 24x Internal DVR-221LBK DVD Rewriter - OEM £14.99
Total : £512.03 (includes shipping : £11.75).

Tony Williams · 15 Dec 2013 at 21:30

Hey... first off consider a tv card?

what bout remotes or nice keyboards??

consider that,.matx based or them rude itx ens or nucs as anothee lad mentioned.

AS FOR SWARE... win 8? Or linux bassd ? Try xbmc and/or mediaportal

Bart_Hunt · 15 Dec 2013 at 23:26

Tony Williams strikes again, episode 3079.
As for the system, some mini itx may be a good idea, especially if its supposed to be small machine for living room.

spaceman763 · 16 Dec 2013 at 18:03

Thanks all for taking the time to reply.

It's given me plenty of food for thought and I've used the build mickyflinn suggested to do some more research. Seeing that the Kaveri APU's are just around the corner I'm thinking of putting the build on hold for a few weeks.