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Upcoming PC Gaming/Living room options?

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Helgaiden

Member
Joined
Jul 14, 2003
As much as id like to build a dedicated high powered steam machine to run in the living room, im interested in some way to play single player games or slower paced games in the living room with my setup. My main gaming rig is in my office in another room, the living room has a Samsung 55" TV with a Denon 5.1 receiver and full polk audio surround sound setup. Ive got a Roku (don't really use it as much anymore because Roku 2 with the new software sucks), my dish Hopper, and a PS3 I use mainly for watching blu-rays. Also I have a chromecast directly connected to the TV but with optical audio routed to the receiver so I can still get surround sound with my chromecast directly on the TV (didn't want to fiddle with it on the receiver).

But lately I want to play some games in the living room. Mark of the Ninja, Deadlight, maybe Assasin's Creed games or other story driven single player games. Recently got The Evil Within...so that too.

I don't have a powerful laptop or even a decent one that can decently run Steam In-Home streaming but I am willing to keep my options open. Ideally id like a gaming laptop or a gaming HTPC in a nMediaPC 6000b case that looks like an A/V receiver.

So how do I get my games in there? Seems like for now, streaming them is the answer. So something that can run Steam In-Home streaming? How well would the performance be? I have a dual-band wireless N Linksys router but no Ethernet drop behind my TV or near the entertainment bookcase.

What about the upcoming Razer Forge TV, using the Razer Cortex streaming setup?

Anything else I should be aware of? Thanks ahead of time
 
For Ethernet, your could try power line adapters. They are fairly straightforward to setup and the speeds are way beyond what you would need.
 
I would caveat power line ethernet. For me it was faster than wifi 'N' but significantly slower than gigabit.

Also it entirely depends on your homes wiring, in some houses it wont work at all.

Steam in home streaming works well over gigabit ethernet, but there is noticeably more latency on medium/high settings.

I believe it is slightly more optimized for new nvidia cards though.

Unfortunately I don't know what specs you will need for a client - My client is a surface pro 1st gen atm.
 
You'll want to get an Ethernet line to the box for streaming, speaking from experience.
Run it under the carpet if you can so you don't see it all the time.

Performance on Gigabit is pretty awesome though. I play with a wireless 360 controller to my HTPC with SteamOS on it. Works flawlessly.
 
I've tried Steam in home streaming via wired and wireless. Wireless is pretty painful. I'd say it's good for turn based strategy games like civilization and that's about it. I got nearly-dialup bad latency issues when I tried it with wifi. I do have a LOT of wifi interference on all channels though due to living in a massive high rise building where every single person seems to have at least a wifi router, if not a router and that darned wireless TV nonsense the cable companies are putting out these days. I can see at least 2 of those.

Running some Cat5e would be your best bet. Even if you have to use a 50ft cable (which is what I'm using), you'll have a very good experience.

You don't need an amazing setup to stream. I use a dual core pentium machine with 4GB of RAM and it works nicely.
 
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