I have PC and a Xbox360 at home. Usually PC runs most of the times, especially when I have to code or play TF2. Since I live in a place where govt is famous for fleecing its citizens via high taxes, I get a electricity bill of approx 2K every month. Which is high according to me. I do not have AC btw. I am thinking if I can replace this behemoth of a PC with a more portable thing like a table or a laptop, it might help to some extent. What do you guys suggest? An iPad 3 or a MacBook /Macbook Pro in lieu of a PC. Perhaps Macbook will be more beneficial as I can run VirtualBox to get to a Linux environment for coding and TF2 runs natively on MAC. How good is an iPad as a substitute of your daily chores if you exclude the programming part. Thanks,
What is your existing config for gaming? maybe you could switch to a more efficient/more powerful config?
I have a AMD 550 Phenom II BE X2, with 4GB DDR2, a ASUS GTX 560 Ti and a Corsair HX 650 power supply. Apart from this a 32 inch Full HD TV, a Xbox360, one ADSL2+ modem + wifi access point. Also, reason which is forcing me to ditch PC is that I cannot play TF2 with good fps even with low setting at my 22" 2209WA's native resolution. This is a shame on either my processor or my Card.
try eeepc or android tablet and you can also get custom boards like raspberry pi to be download station and all that.
raspberry pi? Naah, I have left kernel land, do not want to compile srcs for this board now and then. All I need is no nonsense working setup with minimal fuss.
I'm guessing its your processor mostly. What you can do is upgrade to the newer i3-i5 generation processor + mobo + ram keeping everything same. The 32 incher is also a big culprit in this, since no less than 100-110 watts is what it will consume.
i seriously doubt you have to do that. there are precompiled distros and binaries for raspberry pi. And you need to compile anything in kernel if and only if there is some new hardware change, which i doubt will be case.
if you can afford, it has to be a mac pro of yesteryear. the new one is non-upgradable (? no memory upgrade?) . simply put, a laptop with adequate ram will do well for you. 65-90 watts in most cases. and if possible, you could go even more frugal and charge the damn thing at work and use it on battery at home
what all can raspberry handle? Is there a portable device that can output full 1080p via its HDMI port?
Raspberry pi I highly doubt can play 1080p videos with 5.1 sound. It certainly can work amazingly well as a download rig though. In any case I would not suggest it because it can work as second or a third rig but not as a primary one. I would rather suggest AMD Brazos or Llano because of their lower power footprint, pretty decent onchip GPU and ofcourse the price.
The GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode. The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure. That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics. Is sound over HDMI supported? Yes. FAQs | Raspberry Pi
