I have a PC I primarily use as a HTPC. It's rack mounted, it's connected to a Drobo Pro with 13Tb of hard drives in it. I will sometimes, but not often, play VR games on it. I don't have another room to play VR right now (so this is my main motivation in the upgrade). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here's what the hardware looks like right now: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/d_stilgar/saved/#view=Cj8P6h Note the 1050ti. It actually does pretty okay in VR. Seriously, even with all of the aging hardware, VR does okay. But it's not great, which is my main motivation for wanting to upgrade. The other issue is that it's all housed in a 3U iStar rackmount case. The case is great, but the GPU is mounted upright, which takes up the full height of the case and leaves no room to plug in power cables, which is why I've gone with the low-profile 1050ti. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- These are the upgrades I'm looking at: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/d_stilgar/saved/MK3qkL Why these items? The case will fit in a 3U server shelf (I already have it). I still use my blu-ray drive to rip movies to my Drobo (I also have a slot-load drive already). I already have that PSU as well. I also have a 980ti in my Steam Machine that I'll be moving over to the HTPC when the time comes. What I'm looking for is the cheapest, simplest way to fill out the rest of the build. I'll be sticking with the 980ti for the foreseeable future. What I want is to make sure that I'm not CPU bottlenecked. Otherwise, I don't really care what the hardware is. It just needs to fit in the case I've already purchased. It can be old. It can be end of life. I just want a good value that will last another few years. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As for the Steam Machine, its current parts list looks like this: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/d_stilgar/saved/#view=PdvMnQ The problem is that I've taken the I/O shield off the 980 ti because the Steam Machine had a custom I/O shield for the 780 I pulled out of the machine because standard I/O shields don't work. So I'd like to get a GTX Titan Black (which can use the old I/O shield) at some point and just call the Steam Machine finished forever and never touch the insides again. In the meantime, I'd like to use it until the end of its useful life. The machine will slowly age and at some point I'll retire it as a collectible museum piece of Valve history. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So I'm looking for some advice. Let me know what you would do in this situation. I've thought about getting older hardware on ebay for the i7 2600 in my current HTPC. I've considered upgrading the Mobo, Ram, and CPU to something current gen but keeping the specs to whatever is cheapest that will not bottleneck the 980ti. I'm honestly good with anything as long as it's fairly cheap and gets the job done.
