Upgrade HTPC Graphics, or upgrade for streaming

J

just1tree

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 4, 2007
Messages
83
Hey all, I built my htpc maybe 4-5 years ago and it's still a solid machine that I've only upgraded the graphics card once to an hd 6850 so that I could do some mild gaming on. I've been doing some testing with Steam in home streaming and have found that by using a Phenom x4 940 Black @ 3.0ghz and the HD6850 is not capable of enabling hardware decoding. In order for steam in home streaming to render at 1080p 60 fps I have to turn it off.

As I understand it, AMD introduced VCE with the 7900 series and being that I use an AMD cpu I can't use intel's quicksync either. I've been eyeing the GTX 960 due to it's low power requirements and it's performance, however I wonder if I should just get like a cheap GT 720 and utilize it's purevideo HD decoding instead of trying to render natively on the system.

So I guess the advice I'm trying to get is, should I continue to optimize / upgrade the system to render steam games natively, or should I change my thought process to optimize for in home streaming instead.

I should also mention that I will likely have to update my "streaming" box from it's I5 2500k @ 4.4ghz + HD 7950 as the VCE implementation when turned on tanks my FPS when trying to use hardware encoding on that box. ( I have an asus P8P67 motherboard with no video out so I can't use sandy bridge's quicksync without a motherboard swap to like an H67 or Z68). I'm considering a GTX 970 as I understand that the hardware encoding on maxwell is very efficient at encoding for streams.

Any thoughts or opinions would be welcome. Thanks
 
Will a baytrail soc let you do the hardware h.264 streaming? If so newegg has the ECS LAVA for $80 right now here

If not that then maybe some kind of sff mini box that can basically play the movie being streamed from your main rig. I guess the question is if you do anything else on that rig on your tv?

I have also heard that Xbox One and Windows 10 will let you pretty much do the same thing, but I am sure it will be Microsoft Store locked and not let you do Steam ;)

Also if you plan on getting a new GPU you might as well toss that into your main rig.
 
I use the system for Blu ray playback, I had previously used it to store and host / playback all of my DVD rip collection across my home network. I recently purchased a WD MyCloud Mirror that is now housing that data (even is running as a plex server).

I'm running Kodi on it and trying to fine tune it, trying to get my rom collection put together and play that on the machine as well.

Also use it for HBO Now since I don't really want to watch that on my ipad.

Alot of this comes from checking out the Nvidia Shield Console and how it somewhat does what I want my htpc to do.
 
I tried the Steam streaming and it didn't seem to work all that great with my setup.
I was using my 3770k and 7970 and the client machine was my HTPC, Q9550 with 6950, which I put in the garage to use as my desktop down here.
It was kinda laggy.

I ended up building the 4790k setup and put the HTPC back under the TV to use as an HTPC again.
 
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