Jump to content

Steam Link vs PC Stream ??

KingCollins

Hey guys! Have a peculiar question, not sure if I'm in the right forum.

 

I currently have a Steam Link in my front room and my gaming PC in my bedroom. It works ok, you can clearly see the degraded quality but still 1080p 30Mbps and very little lag because I have everything hooked up gigabit Ethernet, switches, all that jazz . . . 

 

Today I got 2 oldish PC's from work, one has a Xeon W3530 and the other has an i5 which I have no use for, I was wondering if I installed maybe SteamOS or just Windows and had steam running would it perform better than the Steam Link? For example there is only a 100Mbps Ethernet port on the Link which could maybe be a bottleneck. O.o

 

What do you guys think?

My Gaming Rig: AMD Ryzen 5600x  |  Corsair H100i GTX  |  ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming  |  32GB Samsung DDR4 3600MHz  |  ASUS RTX 3070 ROG Strix  |  WD Black 240GB NVMe  |  1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD | 2TB Samsung Enterprise SSD  |  WD Black 1.5TB   |  3x NZXT Aer RGB 140MM  |  Seasonic Focus 750w   |  NZXT H500 Elite   |  Windows 10 Pro

 

My Home Server: AMD Ryzen 1400x  |  Gigabyte Aurora B550 Elite  |  32Gb Samsung DDR3 3200Mhz  |  HP RTX 2060 6GB  |  1TB Samsung 850 Pro  |  2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 18TB | 3x Seagate IronWolf Pro 4TB |  2x WD Green 2TB  |  Corsair CX650m  | Bitfenix Shinobi | Windows Server 2022

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

i am not sure if the stream quality will improve much. i have a core i3 in the living room and can notice a degrade in quality when streaming games from my main pc even though i'm running gigabit ethernet all the way.

 

what i would do is thake that i5 with something like a 1050 ti and put steamOS on there.

 

that way you can run most (if not all) of the many linux/steamOS games directly on the hardware with no delay or degrade and only need to stream the games from your gaming PC that don't run on steamOS or require beefier hardware.

 

in addition to games, you can also run kodi to watch movies and all that stuff. that's something the steam link can't do as far as i remember.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Unless you are experiencing some kind of glitch related to the link, I don't see it making much of a difference if any.

 

With that said, you could always give it a try since you have the extra computers anyway. And feel free to let us know how it works out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

I hope one day soon we reach a point where all homes will have their own central PC that behaves like the brain of the house and we just have interface points with peripherals at various places, office desk, lounge sofa etc etc. 

 

I've tried Steam link and Nvidia shield android TV and nothing beats just running a HDMI from my desk to the lounge room TV sadly :( 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Thanks for your reply guys! So I was up late last night installing SteamOS (which took many moons) and doing some testing vs the Steam Link.

 

The PC I built was a HP Pro 3500 with a i5-3470 and no GPU. At first I chucked an old GT 430 in there to handle the H.264 hardware decoding and noticed a little improvement over the Steam Link in some games regarding display latency, but still the AAA+ titles running on Ultra on my host machine (The Witcher 3, Dying Light, Crysis 3, Metro LL) struggled and still peaked at 50ms delay. I could see from the performance information that the delay was coming from the little GT430 struggling to decode.

 

But do bare in mind I am running on both host and client "Beautiful" with "Unlimited" bandwidth 1080p and 60fps Ultra/Very High.

 

But . . . once I changed to "Software Decoding" to utilize that i5 with a 3.6Ghz boost, man was there an improvement, crisp quality and all games with maxed out settings peaking at a maximum 25ms display latency. 

 

I actually got lost during testing when playing GTA V last night and I forgot I was streaming. xD

 

Definitely a massive improvement over the Steam Link. I have a spare Xeon machine also that I will test maybe tonight and see if the extra threads will help :)

My Gaming Rig: AMD Ryzen 5600x  |  Corsair H100i GTX  |  ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming  |  32GB Samsung DDR4 3600MHz  |  ASUS RTX 3070 ROG Strix  |  WD Black 240GB NVMe  |  1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD | 2TB Samsung Enterprise SSD  |  WD Black 1.5TB   |  3x NZXT Aer RGB 140MM  |  Seasonic Focus 750w   |  NZXT H500 Elite   |  Windows 10 Pro

 

My Home Server: AMD Ryzen 1400x  |  Gigabyte Aurora B550 Elite  |  32Gb Samsung DDR3 3200Mhz  |  HP RTX 2060 6GB  |  1TB Samsung 850 Pro  |  2x Seagate IronWolf Pro 18TB | 3x Seagate IronWolf Pro 4TB |  2x WD Green 2TB  |  Corsair CX650m  | Bitfenix Shinobi | Windows Server 2022

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×