I’m thinking about building a modest Bazzite HTPC with a bunch of spare parts lying around the house. Here’s what I’ve got:
- Intel 4770k
- Asus Z87-A LGA 1150 Motherboard
- NVidia GTX 1060 3gb GPU
- 16GB DDR3 RAM
- 640W Corais PSU
- SilverStone Grandia GD09 HTPC case
I’m assuming that the Nvidia GPU with a lackluster 3gb VRAM is probably the weakest link of the whole system, but I don’t know what a reasonable upgrade might be for an older system (that probably doesn’t support stuff like resizable bar, which I think is needed to get optimal performance of newer GPUs?).
What do you think? What would be the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade to a system like this, assuming the main use case would be gaming and media consumption? What would you do if you happened to have this set of parts lying around in the spare parts bin?
With this setup, I’d build an emulator box / movie player HTPC.
If you want to upgrade something, I’m fairly certain that your GPU is not your bottleneck. Gen4 intel goes way back, and I noticed quite a lot the upgrade from my Gen6 to my Zen2, and back then I was running an RX 480.
That of course means changing CPU, Motherboard and RAM (goodbye DDR3).
The only issue with the 1060 is the VRAM, which pretty much only limits your resolution output - especially in games (as they may have more than one render buffer / frame buffer) - and the texture details in modern games.
Playing movies won’t be affected at all, IMO.
In a HTPC like that, I wouldn’t upgrade anything. It’s too costly to change CPU, Mobo and RAM just for a HTPC “out of curiosity”. I would most certainly at least try to settle with it, and evaluate its shortcomings on the fly. You’ll always be able to upgrade it at a second time.
Maybe just double check your storage, a HTPC should run an SSD as you likely don’t want to wait 2 minutes for it to boot.