A few years ago I built a glorified home server PC, I’m considering dropping a decent video card into it and trying to use it hooked up to a TV as a Linux running Steam machine-esque system, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it based on the other specs. I know the CPU in particular could use an upgrade, but as is should I bother dropping something like an RTX 5070 in it?
A 5070 is absolute overkill for the CPU. The cpu won’t be able to feed the GPU fast enough so it’ll be sitting there idle half the time.
A 5800xt or 5700x3d will work in that board and handle the gpu easily.
How picky are you about graphics quality and what games do you intend to run?
I have a bit of a franken-PC I’ve cobbled together mostly from spare parts from my wife’s upgrades to her own rig and some other bits I’ve gotten good deals on here and there. It’s got an old AMD FX-6300 CPU, and a 2060 I snagged from a friend for cheap. And as of a few months ago I hopped from windows to mint.
And I’m happily running most of what’s out there. It definitely struggles with newer AAA games, I’m not a graphics snob but I do sometimes need to turn down the graphics settings lower than I’d like, some games have atrociously long loading times, etc. and I’m sure there’s a couple resource-hungry games I just straight-up wouldn’t be able to run
But for my standards and the games I play, I find it to be a totally acceptable gaming rig.
So if I were in your shoes I’d totally go for it. It’s not always about having the most optimized powerhouse rig, it’s about playing games.
You will be CPU bottlenecked with that CPU and a RTX 5070. Which is fine if you intend to upgrade the CPU later
I have an old server/work station and dropped a old rx580 into it and put Linux on it then hooked it up to the TV. I use it to run older games on it no problem, think PS3/PS4 era games and Steamlink newer AAA games from my home tower when I notice it struggling or if it’s a windows only game. Works well enough, it also doubles as a web browser and media center PC. It also replaced my blueray/DVD player when I added a combo drive to the server.
I put Mint on it and I was considering putting Bazzit but I didn’t know if I should go through the trouble since Mint seems to be working fine.
I was also thinking about setting it up to double as a media server but I don’t want to pirate anything. But I wish I could legally put my DVD collection on it for convenience, I have plenty of old HDDs laying around for storage.
I think you can legally rip your dvds and transcode them for personal use.
I get conflicting articles when I search it, so I’m not 100% sure.