Now I know the title makes me sound stupid, but it's actually a serious question..
I've been in-home streaming on my laptop which has a i3 3217u in it and Intel HD 4400 graphics and I can stream at 1080p 60fps perfectly but... I can't use steam's big picture even at 720p :(
I know that it's my gpu so i'm thinking of building an even smaller than my old mini itx build in a cooler master elite 110 case with a r7 250 in it and a Celeron G1840 in it.
Will this be better though?
I know that the GPU is a reasonable amount better but do you still think I should go with something else?
And is the Celeron better or worse than the i3?
I know that Celeron's are bottom tier and then i3's are 3 tiers up, but the celeron is basically 3.0Ghz and the i3 is only 1.7Ghz. They're both dual cores and the i3 has hyper threading, but that wouldn't help much here.
The Celeron should be a good bit faster than the I3 since its a desktop CPU, but Im not sure what that has to do with the big picture mode (its just an overlay).
Ever thought about the Pentium G3258? It's a little more than the Celeron G1840, but it's faster and can be overlocked pretty easily if you have a motherboard that supports it. You can overclock it a decent amount even on the stock voltage, so the temperature won't get any higher than stock.
I know that this isn't the end all, be all, but it should give you a decent idea of what the different processors are capable of. For what it's worth, I agree with wiemerimer. The Pentium is a pretty great value for a gaming and for an all-around chip. You should see if you can stretch your budget a little. If not though, take a look at the cpu load on your i3 right now. If you aren't really maxing out, then the Celeron should be more than enough. If you are maxing out, then the Celeron might be enough (I am guessing that it will be plenty personally).
I have a Celeron G1820 in my NAS, for that purpose it works great. A G1840 is a step up from that, and in terms of performance it is about equivalent to an old quad core Q6600. So combined with some of the modern features it gets, its powerful enough to probably do what you need.
But that being said, I would consider spending the extra bones on a G3258. Even if you dont overclock, you still get alot better performance, due to more cache and higher turbo speeds.
A friend of mine I built a machine for has a G3258 and a 750TI. He loves his computer and has no issues.
Yeah I was going to get the Pentium originally but seeing as the Celeron is a decent amount cheaper than the Pentium and my i3 was only getting up to 50% usage at most so the Celeron will probably suffice.
I am just thinking of getting the cheapest motherboard possible seeing as all I need is 1GB of Vram for the most powerful task which surprisingly is "big picture" as I will be using this machine for in home streamind and I can already do that with intel HD 4400 at 1080p 60Fps.
This is the build idea so far: http://nz.pcpartpicker.com/p/wNrKnQ
I have an SSD and will probably use Ubuntu and I don't think that mobo is OC able either.
