Should I get a Nuc i5?

[Shane]

Should I get a Nuc i5 (6th generation) Iris Pro PC for $380, which doesn't include RAM and SSD, and get 8GB RAM and a 250GB SSD and Windows 10 and a wireless keyboard/touchpad, bringing my total up to $680?

I want to play the newest Street Fighter game. According to YouTube, it can run on standard Intel graphics, but absolutely horribly.

I have $750 to work with. I could fit an A10-7870k in a really tiny case, and have it equal about the same price as the Nuc, but there is a catch... that catch is having to put a bit more parts together for minimal performance gains.

For perspective, I will say I had a Pentium N3700 custom built computer, which is pretty much a Core i5 cut in half on a performance level also with half the graphics power, and it had plenty of RAM, and it wasn't really sufficient for gaming at 1366x768. I want to run this new computer at 1680x1050 or 1920x1080.

 

[Segata]

For that kind of money you can just get a PS4 and SFV and several more games.

 

[crunchyg]

I use a NUC i5 as my main machine, built in 2015. My total came to significantly less than $680 though, probably closer to $500, with a 480GB SSD and 16GB RAM.

 

[grahamf]

How about the Skull Canyon nuc?

 

[Shane]

It's $270 more, but a great piece of hardware it seems like. Maybe I can skip Windows and install Ubuntu and then afford it. I would then probably be missing out on Street Fighter because of the OS choice, but oh well.

 

[grahamf]

I didn't realize that the Skull Canyon had a mark of $650. I can't really tell you how well they would perform. I'm planning a build using an i5 and a 1060 solely because everyone says that they can handle almost everything, but I suspect that might still be overkill for me. Could you meet your target with an i3 and the most powerful ~$150 gpu?

I think the best thing to do is figure out what are the games you really want to play and look up what components meet their minimum requirements then go from there.

 

[Shane]

Yeah - the thing is though, the System Requirements a developer lists are often complete lies. They could say it takes a small computer and have it end up like Crysis, where it took years for anything to run it well. Or what is the case most of the time, they say it takes a beefy graphics card and then people on YouTube are shown running it on like a Surface Pro with integrated.