SteamBox – Building Your Own HTPC Gaming System
Peter Donnell / 10 years ago
Picking the Right Components
Many PC enthusiasts will swear you need a GTX980 or a 295X2 to play the best PC games and while yes, they are freaking awesome cards, they’re also very expensive, in fact many of them can be as expensive as the entire system we’re building today! If you have a deep wallet and are willing to spend vast amounts of money on your new SteamBox, go do that, you’ll love it! However, we’re here to put together a nice mid-to-high end rig that won’t break the bank, but that will still play anything on the market you throw at it.
The Sapphire R9 270X is a great budget card, it runs nice and cool and it’s pretty quiet too, making it a great choice for a build like this. Of course, you could easily pick any card you wanted and for around the same price you could pick up something like the GTX960 if you’re more swayed by the green team, although there are faster cards for the same money. The Sapphire 280X is also very close in price to the 270X, so I’ll be testing that out too in the hope we can find an even better price vs performance deal.
- Intel i5-4690K £191.99
- Gigabyte Gaming 5 Micro-ATX Motherboard £169.99
- Cooler Master 412S Cooler £28.99
- Seasonic M12 II 80PLUS Bronze Modular PSU 850W £95.99
- ADATA 128GB SSD £54.99
- ADATA 8GB (4+4) DDR3 RAM £74.99
- Sapphire R9 270X Tri-X 2GB Graphics Card £149.99 or Sapphire R9 280X Tri-X Vapor-X 3GB Graphics Card £179.99
