Gaming - Console purchase or PC build....Yes I know

[SRT10]

Good evening,

 

I am not a gamer by any stretch, my gaming recently was original Xbox every once in a blue moon that would get turned on (however my experiences go back to the Atari 2600 ).  I am however a large Home Theater fella and PC building enthusiast integrating everything I have together.  Last week (while first power up after moving into our new house) my original Xbox died completely and my 2 little boys who are 4/6 years old had only recently found the gaming experience interesting.  Playing Hockey and Snowboarding.  I almost pulled the trigger this weekend on an impulse buy to just replace it with the Xbox One w/kinect as a Christmas present to them (I swear for them )

 

The current area where this will sit (or whatever solution we put together) encompasses my main HT room within the existing cabinet, which houses a large media server MS W10 old q6600, Asus P5K Deluxe 8GB ram with an AMD HD7870 40+TB no SSD's.

 

My main concern/quandry is 4 fold.

 

1.  I could try and run games on the existing media server, quality and performance I'm sure would suffer with the existing hardware's horsepower. (Screen is a Sammy PN64F8500 Plasma so I'm good there). I would still need the PC gaming peripherals/controllers which I have no clue about at this point.

2.  I don't want them to use keyboards, yet that is until their older for gaming in their own rooms, I would love them using actual gaming controllers and heck the kinect or the PS4 Camera type idea for dancing games if that is possible amongst other games would be pretty cool.  The environment I want for them is that we can all mess around together playing games on rainy days. 

3.  I could just purchase an Xbox One/PS4 with peripherals within my budget, connect it to my equipment and be done with it.

4.  Either build a budget gaming rig with all peripherals (controllers and other related gaming device requirements included) in a separate case as I have room for it in the cabinet or upgrade the existing media server to support both functions, gaming & serving content around the house.  Either way in this respect I have no clue whatsoever what components are out there now.

 

$800 is my budget for this (equivalent Xbox One w/kinect with additional wireless plus a few games I can see would be this much) but do not tell wifey I'm fairly certain firing me would be in order.

 

Thank you for any guidance and input provided.

 

SRT10

[plsno]

Why not buy a console and play pc games on your current computer? I would think a q6600 and HD 7870 could handle most games on low-medium and still get decent framerates. You might just have to spend part of your budget on pc peripherals though.

[SRT10]

I had that in mind, however the media server at any given time is streaming to other parts of the house and I do want quality gaming and would rather just leave the server if I can (with it's current equipment that is).  The more I read my own post I'm leaning towards just building a small gaming rig.

[SRT10]

Very true Abyssal, Wii U was the standard wife "why not just get the Wii U, we had a great time at Christmas at (inlaws) bowling" so of course that just ticked me off

Coincidentally, today I noticed my cpu fan on the media server about to kick the bucket timing is great yes ?  All over the map here but I may just upgrade the board/cpu/ram/cooler/Large SSD and Video Card add peripherals and call it a day for gaming on that machine.  I'm not sure where to start with components, off to research I go I guess

[SRT10]

Well, I've made some fun progress and decisions.  Updated the Media server with HyperX 480GB Savage SSD, new Noctua NH-C14, new R9 290x (for a steal of a deal), more storage & raid/sata expansion card as I also lost 2 HDD's that decided to make noises similar to the old playing card in bike spokes.....replacing those this week as well.  My Decision (I won't ever admit my wife influenced this at all) is that I've purchased the original Wii with all the fixings for the kids and our fun stuff for now while addressing the minecraft, lego and few other PC games with 2 x PS4 DS4's and bluetooth dongle to ease them into any PC gaming they would like to try.  All of which outside of the direct hardware upgrades to the media server will be tough to pack away until Christmas time I'm sure