Building Gaming/HTPC Box, want recommendations for components

chadale

Honorable
Jan 13, 2014
8
0
10,520
Hi Everyone,

I plan on building a Home-Theater PC box which will sit with my A/V components and handle both video/audio streaming and gaming duties.

The HTPC will output A/V through HDMI to my receiver which will in turn drive my TV (65" Panasonic plasma) and audio.

My question is really about video cards. Given the TV is limited to 1080p resolution, what video card has me covered for gaming at that resolution. Think of it this way: at 1080p, I want to be able to run any game at a good framerate with textures/detail at max.

I'm thinking of going i7-4770k & GTX 770 2GB, but can I get away with less of a video card and CPU on this build? I'm not particularly limited on power/cooling since I'm going to go with a big case (something like a silverstone LC13-E) that can handle the fans and a decent CPU cooler.

That said, I'd prefer to go with the lowest TDP I can and still achieve a good 1080p gaming machine.

Thoughts? All the review sites pretty much rate at 1440p and up these days, which is way overkill for my purposes.

Any/all thoughts appreciated here. In a perfect, perfect world I would love to be able to achieve all this with a passively cooled GPU but I realize this might not be possible.