New Budget Htpc Lga 1150 Mitx Rig

[Sunny-Tech-UK]

Hello guys and gals, new guy here to the forums.

I am interested in building my first lga 1150 haswell mitx rig, which will be used for htpc use and retro emulation.

My budget is around £300-£400 max.

Here are my specifications so far:


AsRock H81M-ITX

Intel Pentium Dual Core G3420

evga geforce gt 640 2gb

8gb (4gbx2) crucial ddr3 1600mhz

Seagate 1TB Barracuda Internal Hard Drive

Slot load slim blu-ray drive

Silverstone Sugo SG05BB-Lite USB 3.0


Now to the parts i am unsure about.

I see that the case i have chosen for this build needs a smaller "SFX power supply", what wattage PSU would i need for this rig please?

Do you feel that the CPU and GPU will work fine together?

Do you feel that the parts I have chosen are not too power hungry?

Also is having GDDR3 instead of GDDR5 on the GPU a massive difference for what i want to do?

I just need something which will play everything for htpc use and also retro gaming like PS1, NeoGeo etc.

Some games i will be playing are games like Assassin's creed and Tomb raider. These must be able to play at full 1080p with everything turned up to the max detail.

Also will sacrificing graphical AA be noticable at 1920x1080 res? I want a stable 50-60 FPS if possible please.

I will be using this rig on my full hd 1080p television.

Thank you for your kind help,

Sunny.

 

[akzy]

Have you considered using an AMD APU instead? It'll be giving great performance for a htpc system and will be cheaper than that processor with graphics card combo. You're probably not going to need much power at all, no more than 400W.

In addition, oc3d did a great little suggestion build guides for all different price ranges, have a look.
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/systems/oc3d_recommended_system_builds/2

 

[NeverBackDown]

On top of the APU set up if i can recall correctly a 6800k APU is on par with a GT640 anyway?

 

[Sunny-Tech-UK]

Hello, thank you for your replies, and also thanks for the link, very interesting.

I have just checked about the amd a10 apu's, they look like great value.

I guess i will be going down the amd apu route.

Thank you for your help guys and gals,

Sunny.

 

[Feronix]

Some games i will be playing are games like Assassin's creed and Tomb raider. These must be able to play at full 1080p with everything turned up to the max detail.

Also will sacrificing graphical AA be noticable at 1920x1080 res? I want a stable 50-60 FPS if possible please.

Erhmm... that's not going to happen though. You might want to have a look at a dedicated GPU like a GTX660 or HD7850 or higher. If you do that, you'll also need a higher end PSU, like a 450-500 Watt one.

If you really want to play those games, you're going to have to spend more. Otherwise it's just going to be an HTPC that won't run games very well.

 

[barnsley]

I built this for a friend recently, it does perform quite well, only thing is if you could stretch to an extra £20 you could get a decent cpu cooler for it, which would be a better idea. -edit- this is the cpu cooler I used on it: LINK

 

[Feronix]

I built this for a friend recently, it does perform quite well, only thing is if you could stretch to an extra £20 you could get a decent cpu cooler for it, which would be a better idea.

+1 on this.

 

[NeverBackDown]

My budget is around £300-£400 max.
Also is having GDDR3 instead of GDDR5 on the GPU a massive difference for what i want to do?
Some games i will be playing are games like Assassin's creed and Tomb raider. These must be able to play at full 1080p with everything turned up to the max detail.
Also will sacrificing graphical AA be noticable at 1920x1080 res? I want a stable 50-60 FPS if possible please.
I will be using this rig on my full hd 1080p television.
Thank you for your kind help,

Sunny.

Going in order for the spaced questions..
First:Budget will need to be kicked up at least another 100pounds plus(most likely more). Explained later...

Second: DDR3 vs GDDR5 makes quite a difference especially for 1080p and higher res(along with higher AA).

Third: AC and TR are not exactly easy to run on GPUS. They are quite heavy on systems and to max out those 2 games will require a minimum of a 7870(270x)/ GTX 660(perferably ti).

fourth: AA is noticeable in only some games. Depends on how the characters,objects, shawdows and etc are designed. If they were created with a lot of polygons(more than the avg at least) then AA would be less noticeable. In general and for majority of games though, anything above 4x MSAA is not noticeable.

fifth: You're welcome