SteamOS Box - Core Duo w/ GTX670

[Jim K Global Moderator]

I plan on replacing my GTX 670 card in my desktop with a 980ti to push three new monitors. 

I would like to repurpose the 670 and build a small SteamOS box for the living room.  I have an old E3110 Xeon (E8400 Core 2 Duo equivalent) mounted on a Gigabyte GA-E7AUM in my closet with I believe 4GB (maybe 6GB) of RAM.  This system had been my HTPC up until about a year ago...now it just collected dust.  Sound/Display would go from the 670 to my 50 inch plasma @ 1080p.  I have various hard drives and SSDs laying around so storage wouldn't be an issue.

Anyone have experience with low budget Steam boxes.  Think that the GTX 670 would be able to overcome the Xeon's bottleneck?  The "heaviest" games in my inventory are the Metro series with other games like Bioshock, Fallout NV, Mirror's Edge, Wolfenstein and the Portal games.

The reason I'm looking at SteamOS is because I do not have an extra Windows key (gave my 7 Home key to a friend)...except for XP (which is uhh no).  The only money I want to spend is for a case and a game controller as I have everything else lying around.

[Aergan]

Native playing may be hit or miss regardles of the hardware you have but the game streaming (from your main machine) is excellent.

[eddman]

If you do not plan on playing newer, heavier games, that CPU might do alright.

I have a Core 2 Duo E6550 and it's a major bottleneck, even for my GTX 560 Ti in certain games.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

Native playing may be hit or miss regardles of the hardware you have but the game streaming (from your main machine) is excellent.

ahh...forgot about the Steam streaming.  Just tried it out on my current HTPC streaming from my desktop and it does work very well.  Guess the old GTX670 will end up on eBay.  Thanks for the brain jerkier!