GPU Update for a HTPC

personally I think youre trying to ‘polish a turd’ no offense.
Really if you are serious enough to want a gpu upgrade then get a 1060 on an r5 1500x a cheap 350 board and 8gb ram.
Yes its a fair chunk of cash to swallow but its a really good htpc set up and the r5 will handle a gpu upgrade down the line and the 350 board should be able to take a better chip in the future too. It gives you vr level specs for as little as possible with a proper upgrade path over 3 or so years.
just my 2c

new rx460 2gb as its always on offer or being sold off for 550 money new

Thank you for your input guys I think I owe you a little update!

I haven’t been at my PC yesterday, sorry for letting this thread die a little.

What I have taken away from this is that some people are not reading the OP properly :smiley: and that the 1050ti seems to be reasonable for what I am planning to do.

To answer a couple things that came up in this thread:

  • In-Home streaming:
    Up until now I’ve had no luck with in-home streaming. Even though I have a fairly reasonable wired setup the latency is just killing the experience for me.

  • Why not upgrade to x,y,z,…
    See OP:

“First off; upgrading the Motherboard/CPU, RAM and or PSU is not possbile[…]”

  • H.265 / etc. Hardware decoding
    The PC is mostly used for streaming Youtube/Netflix/Amazon Prime/etc. and gaming. Since streaming in 1080p with sw decoding is working perfectly fine I don’t think that it is strictly necessary. I don’t own a 4k display yet and don’t plan on buying one in the next couple years so no hw decoding needed here either. This makes it more of a nice to have thing than a necessity

  • 8 GB RAM
    That depends on the price. As was already stated in this thread we are “polishing a turd”. If I can get 4 more GB of DDR2 on the cheap I will definitely invest here. Though RAM really isn’t an issue at the time beeing. The PC is still running Windows 7 (I don’t even think I could get Win10 to run) and memory management makes me rarely use the 4GB (I don’t have an issue using the pagefile for what it was intended to do :wink: ) .

  • Do you think it is worth it?
    I dumped some time into researching this project since I started this thread. Most of the time the GPU is the bottleneck and CPU usage sits around 50-60% in most games. Only Cities: Skylines managed to choke the CPU yet. Even in World of Warcraft (latest Patch) and Overwatch the CPU is not sitting at 100%, RAM is also fine, only the GPU is sitting at 100%.


To wrap it up, I am buying the 1050Ti IF I can get a good price. In the States you can get a 1050ti at around 150$ give or take, so if I can get one for the equivalent in my money I’ll buy it!

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A note, you can be limiting your fps or getting stutter based on CPU without the CPU sitting at 100% usage.

That said most people way overspend on CPU’s… the average gtx1070 gaming rig has a K series i7 these days… i have a workstation with i7 4770 and Lan box with Pentium [email protected], and honestly the Pentium does just fine in nearly everything, from Fallout4 to Cities Skylines, Argo (arma3) to Doom, good single threaded performance still is enough in makes. The only thing I’ve tried that got noticeable “stutter” on a 60hz display was GTA5, but with some settings tweaks it was still good enough to finish the campaign and get >50hrs of multiplayer in back while it was still new.

Graphics cards are much more important for gaming, but even still far overrated… few titles really look much better between high and ultra, and medium rarely looks bad yet in many games it can be twice the FPS of ultra. I certainly won’t tell people not to built gxt1080ti monster rigs, but too many people spend more than they need for fear of missing out, when really the cheaper card and a few dropped settings gets them perfectly smooth play… and often less “bleeding edge” type issues with drivers, new technologies and so forth.

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