Gonna build a living room HTPC. Had a few projects over the years but they were always used up to some other project. Now I have some spare parts and money, which would give me more power and less power usage (wattage).
Why Grandia, cuz it doesn't look like pc and I've been looking at those cases since 2008. If money wasn't an issue I'd get a GD08 instead but they are 150+ dollars.
I already have 16gb (4x4gb) ram 8gb corsair and some left over 2x4gb 1866 ram which are compatible. I already have a spare blu ray dvd drive and also 2 spare 3TB HDs for media content. I plan to use a cheap ebay air mouse (15-50 dollars) either no name or a mele since they worked great out of the box on my linux/windows OS as well as andriod.
I don't plan on getting a graphics card cuz I want it low power as possible. What my biggest problem is like building old computers is I might have to OC it or add a bigger PSU later in the future.
The Intel is going to use less power, but I doubt that you would notice the difference in all honesty. The AMD rig has more horsepower when it comes to anything graphical, so gaming, maybe GPU accelerated tasks, etc. Intel rig will have the upper hand with CPU dependent tasks that don't multithread well. Personally, I think that the AMD rig is a better all around choice, especially since you are planning on using it for some light gaming. IT will give you more flexibility in what it can do. The G3258 is not a bad chip by any means though. I just don't think that the advantages that the G3258 have over a decent APU are enough to warrant it for anything like this. Now if you were pairing it with a dGPU or planned on rendering videos or something, then the Intel would have more of a say (and I would have to look up benchmarks to find out where each lands, but anyway).
Let's put it this way. I built a desktop about 6 months ago that was mainly going to be running photoshop, multitasking, and powering a few monitors. I went with an A8-7600 (a weaker version of the APU you picked out) over anything Intel. The APUs are solid choices for sure.
EDIT: You should remove the aftermarket cpu cooler from the 7870 build. They come with the new wraith cooler now, so it would be a waste of money to put anything else on as the wraith can easily handle the thermals and isn't loud at all.
If you go with the 7870 you may want to use the stock cooler. It is basically a wraith cooler without the red plastic and fancy wire.. My daughter has one I built for her with the same MB. Stuck an XFX &7 250 2gbddr3 card for dual graphics and it handles Fallout 4 no prob. I have yet to overclock it. When I do I will give it an IGP OC. Did that to my 7850k and wrung another 10 to 15 % fps by going from 720mhz to 900mhz. The 7850 has the cheapo aluminum cooler. We use them as gaming rigs so I can't speak on the HTPC use.
edit: You mentioned 2D games so one otion you might look at is the new skylake Pentium G4400. The graphics are a little better then the 3258 but you give up overclocking. I have no experience with it but there is a review here at phoronix
AM4 is getting announced like literally tomorrow, so I'd wait for that man
Otherwise, why not ITX? The board comes with a wireless adapter, and the Elite 110 is super tiny
The iGPU is going to be pretty far ahead compared to intel's iGPU, so you'd want the APU if you were going to play games
And it's not worth buying the A10 APUs because they're hardly faster, but if you really want one get the A10 7860K, as it's a 65W TDP like the locked one below
Yea i like that build but the reason I went for those boards was they are available at microcenter at approximately the same price as the internet and I get the 20-50 dollar off from the cpu/mobo combo. So for Intel instead of like 150 dollars it's like around 120, for AMD instead of 200 dollars it's around 160, that price saving is HUGE!
I never like itx, gladly that thing has wifi. I always plan on having at least 2 16x pcie lanes so in case I'd ever put a itx gpu card, a raid card, a tv tuner card or another network card it will have expansion slot. Since most of my PC builds are giveaways etc... Last thing I want is to give a PC away and only for the person to realize it can't expand anymore.
Yea the AM4, I might wait if they come out but yea didn't we expect them by March or something? AMD waits too long it's gonna get punched like how nvidia did it with the 1080 release now no one cares about AMD stuff.
Nice recommends but I guess case style just comes down to personal prefence, I'd rather have a VCR looking HTPC or one build in a Super nentendo if I have too than a wierd box with coolermaster badge on it.
The mele air mouse was really magical I had it for my android stick and it worked for my Mint/Windows 10 really good. I really liked it. It works as good as a wii mote and that's saying alot compared to say Microsoft Windows Media Center remotes you see. It's probably on par with wireless mouses and I HATE wireless mouse as a gamer. I don't plan on walking to a HTPC and using a mouse like some idiot, I'd rather wave around at the sofa thanks.
The only reason I could still see upgrading the cooler is for something with a bigger, slower spinning fan -> with the goal being quieter since it's a HTPC.
I built a gaming HTPC in a Fractal Node 605 and it was annoying how loud it would get sometimes. With that said, it was an Intel i5 4670k/nVidia GTX 770 rig that had 3 120mm case fans, 2 80mm fans, upgrade cooler with a 120mm fan, and the 3 80 or 90mm fans on the GPU. I used it for gaming, and it got hot while gaming even with all those fans -> which meant they were usually spinning pretty fast to try and move as much heat out as possible........ and therefore loud. :)
Using a gpu with a blower style cooler would help to keep the internal temp of the pc down which should in turn cause the cpu cooler to spin up less. Ideally, you could put them underwater. You could also look towards a more efficient gpu (as that generates most of the heat in a gaming rig, usually about twice as much as the cpu). A really efficient gpu with a blower style, perfect for an htpc would be the 480. Then again, HTPCs are usually where we relegate old and phased out hardware, so I doubt you would want to buy something new for it.