A question about Media PC's/Living Room PC's

[ZER0]

I have a media pc in my living room that I've used for about 4 years. With windows pushing the update to 10 and not supporting windows 7 anymore I'm left with a pc that will become unusable if I update (I've tried it before years ago when windows forced the 10 update; it made my pc run like crap). I literally only use this one to watch streaming video and browse the internet, it doesn't even have a graphics card. I already have a rig in my gaming room that I use for gaming. This one was built by me and has a dvd drive to play movies on and is as bare bones as you can get.

So I was wondering: Does anyone here have a reasonably priced media pc that they use that runs windows 10? Are there any suggestions for a good pc on the market to purchase? Any suggestions/comments would be appreciated! I'm not looking for high end equipment, and I'm about 50/50 on building vs buying pre-built.

 

[Krud]

I would think a "Media PC" (that you're not planning to play games on) would be fairly cheap to put together at this point, depending what you consider "reasonably priced."

For instance, just now I jumped onto PC Parts Picker and threw one together for less than $700 , and that's assuming you plan to spend $100 on Windows 10. You could even go cheaper than this, but I picked fairly well-rated parts out of habit:

System Builder

pcpartpicker.com

And even that configuration could still run a lot of current games at 1080p, with a quad-core i3-8100 at 3.6Ghz, 16GB DDR4-3000 RAM, a 500GB SSD, and an RX 570 w/ 4GB VRAM. So you could easily dial some of the parts back and save even more.

 

[Zoid]

You could build a perfectly capable Windows 10 HTPC for around $300 (will vary depending on your storage and form factor needs). The Athlon 3000G APU would be a great choice for a build like this. Here is a barebones parts list that gives you an idea. I left off bulk storage and a case since those are totally up to your needs or you may already have some you want to use.

What do you want to do on this machine, exactly? As much as I love little homemade HTPCs, an Nvidia Shield TV might be something you should look into. It's certainly cheaper than building a dedicated machine, and it would be simpler to use if you just want to stream.

 

[ZER0]

Thank you both for the suggestions. I really just use it to stream movies, youtube, etc, as well as browse the internet. I know I could just buy a google chrome device or roku to stream with but my phone kinda sucks and I hate using it to browse the internet. Thanks for the parts list suggestion, that looks pretty promising. I'm also considering getting a mini pc and setting up a NAS station for my local media files. I appreciate the feedback!

 

[Zoid]

Let us know what route you go! I'd love to see the results.

 

[James]

Hmm, i'm kinda curious how bad a four year old computer could be with windows 10 on it?
It's possible it just needed new versions of the drivers to be compatible with windows 10.
Both of my media center PCs are pretty old being built around 5 and a half years ago, and they run fine.

 

[JR88]

I would update at least to a few years ago socket 1151 or Ryzen etc I have both...and gpus are milesss ahead now. Vega is still massively Powerful...you may need to flash it tho. we still haven't unlocked its full Potential...and Nvidia is doing some great stuff and stocking cards in places something that wasn't always the case in the past and you had to get the AMD card...a lot of mid tier cards etc 1660 was at best buy in the display case etc. theirs still no point in getting rx 5700 yet either...we cant even slow down Vega's Lighting efx performance much yet and compute...

 

[Slasken]

For media and just streaming videos, just go with a Shield.

 

[JR88]

Go with AMD it's cheaper and their pulling out all the stops. Navi will drop and destroy any nvidia currently and Ryzen 9 is killer too for only $500. We have dethroned Intel and Nvidia finally lol. Thattt is more than enough power good lord..