Steam Link vs in home streaming... should I switch?

[nintari]

Typically I used to keep a dedicated gaming HTPC in place so when / if we wanted to play games downstairs in the living room we could without causing any issues or needing to share anything. So the HTPC has always been a bit of a beefy machine to make sure I could play everything I had with everything turned up (game engine dependent of course lol). Right now the current config was a 3750k with 16GB, plenty of storage to house the thousands of games I have and a GTX 680. It is plain and simply access anything at any time instantly (games, media etc). Don't ask me how I did it but yes this rig is silent except when playing games

Recently however my son went off to college, and I started to rethink the way I am doing some things in my home setup. typically any time I upgraded my main gaming rig I would hand down the parts to the HTPC. But with me no longer needing a second dedicated gaming PC I started looking more in to Steam in home streaming and no the steam link.

My main rig would obviously serve as the shared machine (specs in my sig). Typically if I play games in the living room they are just that... games you would typically play more so sitting back on a couch with a controller.

with me no longer needing a dedicated gaming HTPC, I thought now would bee a good time to re-design everything and save on power everywhere I could. With plex I've pretty much ditched media center, and I'm incredibly happy with Using a Roku... but for my main surround system the Roku will not work as it does not pass Dolby True HD and DTS-HD MA. So I am still looking at a dedicated HTPC... but not needing as much horsepower.

I'd still like the all in one box feel so I thought of just building up as low power and small of a machine as I can (possibly an intel NUC style i3 or i5). I don't know however how well this works with steam in home streaming (everything would be Ethernet, no wireless). Or would I be better off using the steam link for the gaming side?

Has anyone gone down this road yet? have you tried the steam link and compared it to steam in home streaming on a PC (or seen any reviews that do so). has there been any testing on input lag with either? Granted no I wont be playing battlefield multiplayer on the couch but quite a few games rely heavily on good timing.

Or in the end should I just suck it up and keep the dedicated Gaming HTPC I have now and optimize power a bit more (maybe newer gen card that will use less power on top of that?)

 

[defaultluser]

You should test out Steam streaming before you make the switch. I tried it out using NVENC acceleration over Gigabit Ethernet a few months back, and was less than impressed. On my 2ms Asus TN gaming monitor the latency increase was noticeable but manageable, but the game would get blurry during fast movement.

I consider this unacceptable, especially when my TV already has insane input lag. Adding more lag could make games that are BARELY playable unplayable.

And you don't have to worry about power consumption. The GTX 680 only uses 14w when idle (comparable to newer cards), and the i5 Ivy Bridge idles at about the same power level as Skylake. It doesn't sound like you're playing games all too often, and it's not sucking down much power otherwise, so no need to worry about that. If you don't believe me, get a Kill-a-watt meter and test it yourself. You should be using around 40-50w at idle.

If you don't want to game anymore, then just pull out the GTX 680 and use integrated graphics. That will drop you down to ~30-40w idle.

I'm going to stick with my HTPC with dedicated GPU.

 

[nintari]

funny you should mention that I just purchased a killawatt to test with

the input lag was a concern as the HDTV I have (52" Philips 7403 estimated 16ms but some people have measured between 8-10ms) while older was excellent for it's time it still introduces some lag, but compile on top of that the lag encoding and broadcasting the video takes....

hopefully I can do some extensive testing and get power down as much as possible, I'm going through the same thing on my main gaming rig now (trying to get power usage down as much as possible when idle / surfing web).