Streaming PC

[Grrizz]

So I've been thinking about putting together a cheapish media streaming/smart TV PC for the lounge and thought the G3258 looked like a nice chip, something with a bit of balls that wont hurt the budget and have a small power footprint, but I would also like to use the PC as a (steam) game streaming client (the PC that gets streamed to) my question is would a G3258 be OK for this?

My thinking was it should be fine if technically all its doing is decoding a h264 stream but after seeing the recommendation of hardware accelerated decoding it got me wondering, is this the recommendation because some people might be running something substantially less powerful requiring hardware decoding to get the job done? or is it to do with added latency something which you wouldn't see when watching movies? (which I know this chip can do without even breaking a sweat) or is it because of some other factor that game streaming introduces that I'm not considering?

The other options would be OBS with quick sync but to be honest the minimalist in me would prefer to avoid that route due to it not being a part of my software eco-system already or throwing in something like a GTX750 but if its not necessary I'd rather not have it.

What do you guys think? I'd particularly like to hear from anyone who's actually tried it even if its on a similar setup, what was your experience? Smooth? Unplayable? Smooth most of the time? Regularly choppy? Laggy?

Cheers in advance

[Silmano]

An AMD A10 can run Steam In-Home Streaming (as receiver) without issues, and also it will play multimedia content without the need of an external GPU. As for Steam In-Home Streaming, a cabled network should be the ideal.

 

BTW, G3258 has a max TDP of 53 W, if you want a more efficient processor I would recomend an i3 'T' one (for example i3-4130T), those have a max TDP of only 35W and they should be able to run Steam In-Home Streaming without a GPU.

[Grrizz]

@Silmano - Thanks a lot for the info, I'll have to look into those options, Intel is normally my go to chip (mostly because I'm not usually building budget restricted PCs) so I naively overlooked AMDs APUs, I'll admit I still have a bit of a Intel bias so I'll weigh them up against the i3 and would still like to hear if anyone has experience with a Pentium being used for this.

I'm not particularly familiar with the AMD APUs but after having a quick look around it seems like the A series all support UVD (hardware accelerated decoding) so in theory even an A4 would be OK?

The power consumption isn't a huge concern because the reality is it usually comes out to only be a few extra bucks a year but I'm really looking for something cheap for two reasons, one being this system probably wont be getting a huge amount of use particularly on the gaming side just on occasion when I have friends over and aren't intending on LANing, it'll be used more for convenient video streaming. Secondly I'm wanting to use it in a submersion build, basically I just feel better about putting cheaper things in oil The hardware will be the lesser important part of the build it'll more about the case/visual appearance.

It looks like I've got a bit of digging to do but if anyone else has some insight into what is essentially the cheapest CPU that can handle being a Steam In-Home-Streaming client I'm all ears

[Electronics Wizardy]

Many people don't realize how little compter power it takes to be a client. You could easily use a late core 2 duo or a celeron.

I suggest a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157513&cm_re=baytrail-_-13-157-513-_-Product 

as they are ultra low power and cheap

[Grrizz]

@Electronics Wizardy - Thanks for the input, that's great to hear! After doing a bit more reading I was starting to come to the conclusion that pretty much all modern CPUs would be fine as they all seem to have some level of hardware decoding but a C2D or Celeron being able to cope is awesome - I have a couple of C2Ds lying around but all the matching components I have are butt ugly so I might pick up a new Pentium/Celeron or something (shallow I know ), it'll give me something new and interesting to play with too.

I built a G3420 rig for my folks earlier in the year and had borrowed that for some testing, while it ran it was hovering around 25-45 fps at 1080p and felt somewhat choppy but then I realised I was going through a 100mbps router and the bandwidth was saturating so a bit later on I'll put it on a gigabit connection to confirm but yea looks very much like anything will do which is great news for me!

Hmmm wonder if I sold my old Pico-PSU? that would fit nicely in this build...

[Grrizz]

FYI after changing to a gigabit connection everything was good on my folks G3420, 1080p @ 60fps and looks great, only a little latency, hardly noticeable but would be fine for casual play/single player, from what I hear the Nvidia 340 beta drivers support hardware encoding now so that might help some (I haven't tried them yet).

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction I'm currently eyeing up the Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V with a Celeron J1900, then throwing 8GB RAM in, repurposing an old 120GB 840 EVO and powering it with a picoPSU

[Electronics Wizardy]

FYI after changing to a gigabit connection everything was good on my folks G3420, 1080p @ 60fps and looks great, only a little latency, hardly noticeable but would be fine for casual play/single player, from what I hear the Nvidia 340 beta drivers support hardware encoding now so that might help some (I haven't tried them yet).

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction I'm currently eyeing up the Gigabyte GA-J1900N-D3V with a Celeron J1900, then throwing 8GB RAM in, repurposing an old 120GB 840 EVO and powering it with a picoPSU 

Glad I could help you