Hello all I have a MicroATX PC in my lounge which I'm using for an occasional HTPC and light gaming machine. It's a dirty great MicroATX tower which sits on the floor doing a fantastic job of hoovering up dust/cat hair and making a racket. It's about time to scrap it and build a smaller machine. My main issue though is that it has to be capable of some light gaming as the other half uses it as a Steam box. To give you an idea of the sort of GPU grunt, the games she plays on it are along the lines of: Lego games (she's still buying these damn things) Skyrim Alice: Madness Returns Fable: Anniversary Not hugely power-hungry games by any means, but not something a Kabini APU is going to able to handle. I do also sometimes play some higher-end games, but I tend to stream those over the network from my main rig. Most of the specs really aren't important - except for an SSD, which should be standard these days - but my absolute minimum requirements for this build are: Low power (if at all possible) Compact footprint (preferably not a mini-ITX tower or cube style case) Low noise Mini-ITX - this is non-negotiable A 750 Ti GPU is an ideal choice... except for the fact that it needs a dual-slot cooler, and that rather contradicts the "compact footprint" requirement. A Trinity/Richland APU is probably going to be my best bet, but that pushes the power requirements far higher than I'd ideally like. The budget for the whole build is about £500 max, and I won't be putting it together for a few months yet (March/April at the earliest). All advice/ideas welcome
March/April? Wait, see what happens. Broadwell might be here by then on the Intel side, and we may see more mid/low end GPU launches. Prices will also fluctuate, so any build now won't be valid.
Yeah, there's a little while until I'm actually going to build the machine. But I'm beginning to think that I'm really going to need something with an integrated GPU, so unless there's something ground breaking around the corner (aside from price drops) I don't think my options are going to change that much.
For £500 you should be headed towards a build that has a dedicated GPU - something akin to the 750Ti as you mentioned. Broadwell is (apparently) going to be a lot more power efficient than Haswell, and likely to come with some kind of boost to iGPU performance. Of course, until it's here, nobody knows. NVIDIA need to release their 9xx series mid/low end cards, and AMD are apparently coming out with their next generation too. It may well impact on GPU prices, especially slightly older models. So yeah, wait it out until a lot closer to your build time and then start the research.
