I second skipping over the motherboard for a budget-but-upgradable build. Video card is the most important thing, so as long as the motherboard supports it, it’s good enough, and the vast majority will.
That said, second hand graphics card still isn’t a bad idea, since when you’re finished with the build some years down the line, the video card will be the oldest component.
Instead, get an NVMe M.2 hard drive, and a PCIe expansion for it since that budget motherboard probably won’t have native support. Expansion cards costs hardly anything relatively, and native support can be added to the list. A great hard drive makes ok RAM better than OK and cuts level loading times significantly. Honestly, adding a great hard drive to even some tiny budget dell desktop with built in graphics makes an ok budget gaming computer.
If there’s money left over get a good sound card or whatever peripherals you’d prefer, maybe Wi-Fi/Bluetooth (budget mobo probably skips them) and RAM if the budget mobo is still a recent one. Despite the TV likely being good enough, too. I wouldn’t focus on the motherboard until you’re picking out the high-end CPU, which is expensive but also just a lower priority than the other stuff, so a good monitor is on that peripherals list, too.
That dell comment is from experience, I made one into a surprisingly decent Minecraft/Roblox machine for a relative. Only thing that stopped it was the HDD it used. A solid-state drive is sufficient, m.2 is just future-proofing.
No harm in trying it first. Beyond basic connectivity, here are some things you’ll need to check for.
You’ll want to make sure you can turn off overscan in your TV settings or the edges of what the computer will display will be cut off in the image. This can make navigating things like the Windows desktop a little difficult.
Then you’ll want to make sure responsiveness is acceptable. Perform any action (click something, type something in Notepad, etc.) and make sure the TV displays it instantly. If not, you will need to enable Game Mode on your TV if it is available. Sometimes a Sports mode will get you there too. If such a mode isn’t on your TV and there are no other settings that reduce the response delay, you’ll need a dedicated monitor.
If you’re OK on both of these things, the only thing left would be stuff like resolution and color matching. For the best image, make sure the computer is set to use the TV’s native resolution. This may not necessarily be the highest resolution available, FYI. As an example, I have TVs that are 720 native but will accept and display 1080, albeit things don’t look great at that scale. Your mileage may vary. For color matching, don’t worry too much about accuracy if you’re not doing things that require a perfectly calibrated display. Set the picture mode on the TV to whatever vivid/movie/sports/etc color mode works for you, but keep in mind some of these can affect the delay depending on the TV (see above).
Depends on the TV. For gaming, it would be essential that it has some form of gaming/low latency mode.
Also, why would you pay extra for a “good” main board? That’s literally the one thing where you can go cheap without a problem if you’re not investing in the high-end segments of the other components.
As a sidenote: have you looked at something like a SteamDeck for your kid? It’s a full fledged PC that you kid can hook up to the TV and if you want to watch something on it the kiddo can still use it with the build in display. the base model is also dirt cheap for what you get.
I played a lot of Elden Ring with a steam deck plugged into a cheap TV. I wouldn’t want to play anything competitively on one, and I wouldn’t want to play FPS on it like that, but overall it wasn’t bad.
Get the lowest model with a microSD card and go to town for a few hundred bucks. If it’s ever not enough it’s pretty simple to break one open and replace the drive with a 1TB drive. I have dozens of games installed across microSD cards and shaders filled my drive. Took me about 20 minutes to replace it. Would take someone with no knowledge probably an hour.
Second on going for a more budget motherboard. They seem the most likely of any to change acceptable inputs over time. A proper 1080p (preferably 144hz but 60-90 isn’t unacceptable) monitor will give a lot of longetivity.
Thank you for the motherboard advice. I was under the assumption that it’s something you buy once good and it shouldn’t change.
I should look into steamdeck. I know nothing about it 😅 Price wise it seems interesting, but that makes me doubt about specs. I’ll review some sites and YouTube’s to get a good idea of what it can do.
I’ve done it with an old cheap tv and it sucked and i got ghosting and choppy refresh rate. I’m sure if you get a decent modern tv would be fine though. I’d also want to check latency.
I’ve started playing Ghostrunner. I’ve really missed level based games, and the gameplay is just thrilling. It’s really been a blast trying to go faster than my friends, as well as collecting all the items in some really well designed levels
Figure out your price point, then get the highest scoring card in that range.
Say for the sake of argument you don’t want to spend more than $300 on a GPU:
GeForce RTX 3060 TI at $302 and change, not bad.
Radeon RX 6750 XT out performs it, but it’s also $360 instead of 302. So are the extra 500 points on their performance scale worth $60? Probably not.
Prices are more of a guide, search around, you might find them for less. Just using the shopping tab at Google, I found the GeForce for $250 at NewEgg.
The controllers connect to the Shield. You can also connect keyboard and mouse to it.
I find Steam Link to be slow and low framerate though. Sunshine running on the PC and Moonlight running on the Shield seen to do the trick. I also disabled the image sharpening on the Shield because it looks really odd.
Nvidia GameStream being disabled now is a really fucking shitty thing for them to do. Sunshine lacks the ability to change the PC resolution to match the streaming resolution.
I’m a pretty big user of abbreviations, and usually I understand them. But some times my mind just gets locked and I can’t decipher the abbreviations, and I begin to wonder if we’re using too much of them.
Currently playing a lot of Minecraft with my daughter and her boyfriend. Have set up a server so we can pop in and out when we want to. Having a blast.
Also playing started playing sea of stars. Beautiful game and excited where it will go.
And there is always time to play another round of enter the gungeon!
I’m on vacation, so I’ve returned to my default Steam Deck game: Wildermyth. I love its storytelling, particularly with carrying characters over from one campaign to another. I’ve grown particularly attached to the warrior from my first campaign, now fully fire-transformed. However, he’s moved on from his first love, who is now far too crow-like.
For broad compatibility and good quality+compression, h265. I use Handbrake’s Nvidia encoder and it works great. I’m not sure about the differences between AAC and AC3.
AAC is generally more modern and better for lower bitrates, but AC3 (also known as Dolby Digital) has the advantage of being able to be transmitted in 5.1 over SPIDF optical connections, so it can allow for surround sound in older setups that may not otherwise be able to recieve digital surround sound.
Opus is slightly better than AAC at matched bitrates, slightly less commonly supported, and totally open-source. It’s a fine choice as well.
Also of note because of its use for anime encodes is FLAC, which is lossless and therefore results in much larger files, but will always have the exact same quality as the original audio it encoded, so it’s excellent for archival quality.
Just finished Rakuen not too long ago and I love(d) it. The game play is really simple, any of the puzzles are simple enough, the music is for the most part pretty solid, and the story was pretty good. Nothing to complain about besides how short it is.
Not sure what the next big game I’ll be playing is, but I have been thinking about saying screw it and playing Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters again.
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