HTPC worth it?

[BroBoCop]

I recently upgraded my gaming rig, so my wife’s pc got my hand me downs.  I now have a Ryzen 5 1400 and an 8 gig set of memory on hand.  We currently use an Xbox one s in the living room and an Amazon cube in the bedroom.  I’m kicking around the idea of getting something like a 320 mobo and a gtx 1030 and building an HTPC, but I can’t decide if the cost incurred is worth it.  Any ideas or recommendations would be helpful with that I can’t justify using another cpu or upgrading from the 8 gig 2400 kit I have.  Is this even 4k worthy? Will windows really handle hdr well?

[WereCatf]

22 minutes ago, BroBoCop said:

but I can’t decide if the cost incurred is worth it.  Any ideas or recommendations would be helpful with that I can’t justify using another cpu or upgrading from the 8 gig 2400 kit I have.  Is this even 4k worthy? Will windows really handle hdr well?

Personally, I don't think an HTPC is worth it, unless you want to play games on it and can't use Geforce Now or you really insist on using optical discs for content. An HTPC doesn't offer any benefit and only offers disadvantages, otherwise.

 

For actually consuming content, there are far better options that have been designed from the ground up for large-screen usage, like e.g. the NVIDIA Shield TV (I have one and it's fabulous) and even gaming can be handled by the aforementioned device perfectly well, if your Internet-connection is good enough for Geforce Now or you have a desktop in your house, since you can then use Steam Remote Play on it.

[Donut417]

4 hours ago, BroBoCop said:

I recently upgraded my gaming rig, so my wife’s pc got my hand me downs.  I now have a Ryzen 5 1400 and an 8 gig set of memory on hand.  We currently use an Xbox one s in the living room and an Amazon cube in the bedroom.  I’m kicking around the idea of getting something like a 320 mobo and a gtx 1030 and building an HTPC, but I can’t decide if the cost incurred is worth it.  Any ideas or recommendations would be helpful with that I can’t justify using another cpu or upgrading from the 8 gig 2400 kit I have.  Is this even 4k worthy? Will windows really handle hdr well?

Outside of a Plex server. I don’t think it’s worth it. Even then you need to take the time to digitize all your movies and that takes time. Personally I feel Amazon, Apple, Roku, etc, do a good job of getting media where they need to be. Plex is great if you want to share media you own around your home. I personally use Plex as a DVR for OTA TV. Outside of those use cases, I’d find another use for that hardware. 

[JZStudios]

HTPCs used to be good on Win7 with Windows media center and some other apps, but MS pretty much killed all that off. We use Plex, which is nice to cut on data usage, but even then it's an old and rather crap Win7 PC that then uses the local network. You could do the same thing on yours or your wifes PC.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

To me, it definitely is. The only alternative would be to hook my server directly to the TV and music player in the living room, but I don't want to have the server in the living room nor running several cables across the house, some of which probably can't hold the signal that long. I have proper ethernet wiring, though, so a silent HTPC has me covered. Some people's use case will allow them to use smaller/lower power solutions, but none of them are versatile enough for mine - suffice to say that before the HTPC I found myself constantly using my laptop as HTPC, with the inconvenience of not being a dedicated device (hence the need to hook and unhook it all the time, and still no optical drive so not suitable for older media).

How much to spend on it is a different story, but in my case I was repurposing old hardware, so it was a no-brainer.