I am building a HTPC for our living room, which will also be used for some light gaming with a controller. (By light, i mean games like five nights at freddys, and other games on medium settings at 1080p. Our TV is 4K for 4K home and commercial movie playback. Most of my gaming is done on the PS2 Compatible PS3 (RSX reballed, awesome unit) and my PS4...
I have bought a decent kaby lake board to give me wiggle room to upgrade the CPU in future when budget allows. I just need something so this works instantly with room for further upgrade in a few months (although if suitable for HTPC use ill keep it). All other parts I have, and have matched
I am on a very tight budget, primarily because I allocated 3K on a high end custom laptop and used most of my savings to clear all my debts to start a fresh (never to get into debt again), with dual 1080 GPUs and an i7 7700K custom build as most of my work is done on the move and involved intense rendering. All parts bar the CPU, RAM, case and motherboard I had on hand. In light of this, I have NO intention of using the PC now or in the future for any intense computing tasks, only what I have described.
The video card we have available is more than adequate for this PC two spare Nvidia GTX 980 and an SSD for a boot drive, windows 10 pro, and 8GB of RAM. (DDR4 seems so expensive).
This PC will also be used for a backup file store as well with two dual 12TB HDDs to be inserted inside. PSU is a corsair HX850 platinum I have lying around, yes i know its a hammer to knock in a nail, but its there and has been sat in my loft since my old mining days.
Now of course, celeron is as low end as low end gets. I am looking merely for media, office tasks and home theater use with light gaming on the TV (not at 4K resolution). I have checked benchmarks and find conflicting results on 4K video playback for celerons, as I am stuck between this and the Pentium thats a mark up from it, but if i was to get the Pentium i would be better off spending a few quid and getting the i3 and doing away with the debate, as a kaby lake i3 would be more than adequate.
The GPU will be put to work mining cryptocurrency when the system is idling and not in use using the nicehash miner to also heat the room during winter time. Those two cards make about £2.50/day, the heat means i just turn the heating down. No issue with power costs as i heat the room anyway.
So guys, in your wisdom, do you feel the Celeron G3930, Pentium/i3 is the better choice for my goals? No point overspending on a CPU if I do not have to if it suits the purpose of the machine. The 4K video is very important, but I wonder if it lacks the horsepower to do that and will bottleneck us. I have researched benchmarks and CPUs as always, but i cannot find a solid answer re. this CPU. I am considering it because my mate wants to sell his for an i5 upgrade, and is offering it to me for a mere tenner along with its cooler and I already have my own thermal paste. A tenner is a steal considering its usual £35 price.
Not had a celeron since my mother got me my first 'modern' windows XP PC to upgrade from my windows 98 PC in 2004. A good step up from my P1 machine and I loved it, but the celeron always has its limitations compared to the i7s i have always owned!
Jacob
I have bought a decent kaby lake board to give me wiggle room to upgrade the CPU in future when budget allows. I just need something so this works instantly with room for further upgrade in a few months (although if suitable for HTPC use ill keep it). All other parts I have, and have matched
I am on a very tight budget, primarily because I allocated 3K on a high end custom laptop and used most of my savings to clear all my debts to start a fresh (never to get into debt again), with dual 1080 GPUs and an i7 7700K custom build as most of my work is done on the move and involved intense rendering. All parts bar the CPU, RAM, case and motherboard I had on hand. In light of this, I have NO intention of using the PC now or in the future for any intense computing tasks, only what I have described.
The video card we have available is more than adequate for this PC two spare Nvidia GTX 980 and an SSD for a boot drive, windows 10 pro, and 8GB of RAM. (DDR4 seems so expensive).
This PC will also be used for a backup file store as well with two dual 12TB HDDs to be inserted inside. PSU is a corsair HX850 platinum I have lying around, yes i know its a hammer to knock in a nail, but its there and has been sat in my loft since my old mining days.
Now of course, celeron is as low end as low end gets. I am looking merely for media, office tasks and home theater use with light gaming on the TV (not at 4K resolution). I have checked benchmarks and find conflicting results on 4K video playback for celerons, as I am stuck between this and the Pentium thats a mark up from it, but if i was to get the Pentium i would be better off spending a few quid and getting the i3 and doing away with the debate, as a kaby lake i3 would be more than adequate.
The GPU will be put to work mining cryptocurrency when the system is idling and not in use using the nicehash miner to also heat the room during winter time. Those two cards make about £2.50/day, the heat means i just turn the heating down. No issue with power costs as i heat the room anyway.
So guys, in your wisdom, do you feel the Celeron G3930, Pentium/i3 is the better choice for my goals? No point overspending on a CPU if I do not have to if it suits the purpose of the machine. The 4K video is very important, but I wonder if it lacks the horsepower to do that and will bottleneck us. I have researched benchmarks and CPUs as always, but i cannot find a solid answer re. this CPU. I am considering it because my mate wants to sell his for an i5 upgrade, and is offering it to me for a mere tenner along with its cooler and I already have my own thermal paste. A tenner is a steal considering its usual £35 price.
Not had a celeron since my mother got me my first 'modern' windows XP PC to upgrade from my windows 98 PC in 2004. A good step up from my P1 machine and I loved it, but the celeron always has its limitations compared to the i7s i have always owned!
Jacob
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