With the setup we’ve tested today, assuming you chose to go with a single Sapphire R9 280X Tri-X Vapor-X graphics card, you would be looking at an investment of approximately £796.93, let’s just call that £800. Immediately I know you can save money on this build, you can choose a lower wattage power supply, you can choose a cheaper graphics card, you can move down to a mini-ITX Gigabyte Gaming 5 motherboard since you’re only using a single graphics card, you can get a cheap chassis; there’s really a lot of corners you can cut. However, I picked my components based on upgradeability and having that extra PCIe slot on the Gigabyte motherboard I chose, will reap their own rewards in the future; designing your rig in a format that limits it’s upgrade potential is rarely a good idea and could end up costing you more money in the long run.
£800 is a lot of money for a Steambox, which is a nice way of making a PC into a console. If you plan on using SteamOS then you’ll save money again by not having to buy Windows, but is SteamOS really ready for the living room yet? That’s something we certainly aim to find out in our next article and I’m hoping to see if we can squeeze any extra performance from our games by dropping Windows from our system altogether.
Gaming in the living room on the big screen is as easy as spending £400 on an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 with a couple of games. By making the extra investment into a SteamBox/HTPC style gaming system, you’ll be spending twice as much now, but the level of features, free games, cheaper games, improved performance, upgradeability and more that you’ll get from day one more than justifies the cost.
Gaming at your desk is a wonderful thing, but having a high-end gaming system that fits snugly into your home entertainment system, that can really provide you with high-definition gaming at 1080p and 60fps is a wonderful thing and with the system we’ve built today, you would be very happy with the overall performance and upgradeability.
If you’re planning on building a gaming rig like this in the near future, we want to hear from you, so head on over to our forums and start a discussion on your hardware requirements. I also invite you to ask questions about our own Steambox testing and what kind of Steambox/HTPC gaming system tests you want to see from us next.
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