Question Best cheap PC under 250 for emulation, browsing, and twitch

[esb89]

Hello, I've been pulling out my hair for two days straight trying to decide on which PC to purchase for emulation, streaming, and possible live streaming emulation.

I've been using a raspberry pi 400 for both gaming and browsing as I do not own a windows desktop. Needless to say, I don't need much power to suit my needs but would like to get the most bang for buck. Linux is also a huge pain in the butt, ha.

I'm currently looking at the SFF and mini HP elitedesk series on Amazon. The 800 g5 mini with Intel six core i5 9500T 16gb DDR4 is priced at $218 while the g2 i5 6500 with 8gb ddr4 is a hundred bucks cheaper.

do the SFF include features like graphics card that the mini do not? Am I perhaps looking in the wrong place and should decide on something better?

Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂

 

[punkncat]

I would ask, can you build a PC? Have you ever done so?

Those refurbished office type computers from HP/Dell are typically a pretty good value for machines that you are 110% sure you will never be looking to upgrade. The SFF models typically cannot hold a powerful graphics card and even when they can are half height one slot variants that aren't a shadow of their powerful brethren.

The "T" variants are also the super low power option for the line, so they don't have much by way of kick. The 9500T is a bit weaker than something like the i3 10100 desktop variant. I would not really recommend either for live streaming, but not to say it wouldn't work.
If you need a bit of power in the iGPU, it may be worthwhile to consider some of AMD "G" variants as the onboard graphics with those is considerably better than Intels integrated option.

Unless you look at the used market and luck across something this time of year I am not sure you can find a system with a graphics card for that price...at least nothing semi recent. Everything you mentioned is going to be a world of power in comparison to the Pi.

 

[TerryLaze]

If these are the actual models of CPUs that are in there then they do have quicksync on their iGPUs meaning that any streaming will be handled by the iGPU.
Emulation can be done with a super low end GPU, maybe the iGPU will even be enough for both streaming and playing as long as it's really old school emulation.
If you want to go for ps2 wii with pretty filters and 4k resolution it's not gonna cut it.

 

[esb89]

I would ask, can you build a PC? Have you ever done so?

Those refurbished office type computers from HP/Dell are typically a pretty good value for machines that you are 110% sure you will never be looking to upgrade. The SFF models typically cannot hold a powerful graphics card and even when they can are half height one slot variants that aren't a shadow of their powerful brethren.

The "T" variants are also the super low power option for the line, so they don't have much by way of kick. The 9500T is a bit weaker than something like the i3 10100 desktop variant. I would not really recommend either for live streaming, but not to say it wouldn't work.
If you need a bit of power in the iGPU, it may be worthwhile to consider some of AMD "G" variants as the onboard graphics with those is considerably better than Intels integrated option.

Unless you look at the used market and luck across something this time of year I am not sure you can find a system with a graphics card for that price...at least nothing semi recent. Everything you mentioned is going to be a world of power in comparison to the Pi.

I've yet to build my own, but would be up to the task as long as it doesn't far exceed my budget. Thanks for the info on the T variants. I was thinking higher number = more power. May decide on a desktop instead

<Mod Edit: Fixed quote>

 

[esb89]

If these are the actual models of CPUs that are in there then they do have quicksync on their iGPUs meaning that any streaming will be handled by the iGPU.
Emulation can be done with a super low end GPU, maybe the iGPU will even be enough for both streaming and playing as long as it's really old school emulation.
If you want to go for ps2 wii with pretty filters and 4k resolution it's not gonna cut it.

Thanks for the input. This answers a question I had about needing a GPU for streaming 16 bit gaming. Unfortunately, I may have to settle for 1x emulation on the ps2 and wii which is still light years ahead of the Pi lol