Low-mid range gaming PC for living room

drgruney

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Jun 6, 2009
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I'm thinking of getting an Asus RG6 or Alienware Alpha for the living room ($500-$650) but I'm wary of new products that may be just around the corner. The Alpha has only seen a small CPU bump since it was released a year ago and the RG6 has already been out 8 months (and is the only product Asus hasn't announced a followup for).

Anyone have thoughts on when we may see refreshed products in this category? Is there another manufacturer I should be looking at? I'm open to the idea of a Steam Box but would prefer a Windows machine.

I'm very comfortable making my own systems but can't seem to beat the quality/quiet for the prices being offered by the big guys.
 
Solution
The newer iGPU on Skylake is about as powerful as a good AMD 7xxx series APU. So it should suffice for 40-60 FPS @ 720p-900p until you can get a discrete GPU.
The new products are probably going to be coming out next fall, with Zen/Kaby Lake combined with Pascal/Arctic Islands. If you build your own systems I would expect to be able to next July/August. For now, I might just get a Skylake system and buy a discrete GPU later, trusting in the iGPU to at least handle HTPC duties. If you are waiting, I really can't tell you what is coming. HEVC support is known, and there are speculations on AMD APUs with stacked HBM but we don't have much definite info yet.
 

drgruney

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Jun 6, 2009
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Thanks for the quick reply.

I'm not planning to use this as an HTPC, just games. Mostly casual party games like Speed Runners, Mount Your Friends, and some single-player like Shadow of Mordor. Do you think the baked in GPUs of current Intel chips would be enough for the casual games?