Home theatre/streaming pc

[Reour]

Budget (including currency): £300-500

Country: United Kingdom 

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Netflix, Chrome, UK based vod providers, eventually streaming from a plex server 

Other details: will be hooked up in the living room to a 4K LG C1 oled

 

Hey all, long time viewer first time poster. I’m looking for some advice about building a pc to use in my living room, I have a smart TV and chrome cast already and that covers around 90% of the streaming I do but there are some providers one notably being SkySports in the uk where it’s difficult to find supported devices which is why I’m looking to get a pc for this. I also want to use it in the future to steam movies from a plex server.

 

I was thinking of getting a NUC like this https://www.icubes.co.uk/asus-pn62-series-intel-10th-gen-mini-pc.html but I’m also not sure if it would be a better idea to build something custom ideally I’d like it to be small form factor so it can fit in my unit. I’m also unsure if for 4K and for the most part 1440p steaming I need a dedicated graphics card or if intel build in UHD graphics would be enough 

Thanks in advance!

[da na]

Welcome to the forums!
I do 1080p streaming on a Core 2 Duo system with 4GB of RAM and a cheap Radeon card, and that rarely uses all of its resources. You could get away with a quad core CPU and cheap video card.

My recommendation is buying a 3rd-4th gen i5 system off ebay, 2 core 4 thread or 4 core 4 thread. i5-4570 ish range. Put in a small SSD, Quadro k620 GPU (good video decoder, support for 4k) and boom that's like $150ish for a quiet SFF PC

[Queen Chrysalis]

19 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

Welcome to the forums!
I do 1080p streaming on a Core 2 Duo system with 4GB of RAM and a cheap Radeon card, and that rarely uses all of its resources. You could get away with a quad core CPU and cheap video card.

My recommendation is buying a 3rd-4th gen i5 system off ebay, 2 core 4 thread or 4 core 4 thread. i5-4570 ish range. Put in a small SSD, Quadro k620 GPU (good video decoder, support for 4k) and boom that's like $150ish for a quiet SFF PC

eBay would be OK, but frankly you'd do better to check facebook marketplace, craigslist or any kind of garage/surplus sale, as these things will often be about 20-50 pounds on there.  You really don't need much, and literally anything core-i will do quite fine.  An HD 7000 or newer GPU should have all of the encoders you need, and those can be had on eBay for about 20 pounds.  Check out amazon for a wireless keyboard with a touchpad, makes using a living room PC a breeze.  I got a basic microsoft one for like 25 USD.