Project JASPER: If I only had a brain

Last week, I set myself the goal of building a budget PC that will run SteamOS and perform comparably to a console, which starts with putting a brain — or brains — into our machine.

I've spent so much time on this part of the planning process. I’ve gone through like five iterations of this build on pcpartpicker just for this first part alone. I’ve second-guessed myself, double-checked numbers, shopped for deals, and only cried a little.

To video card or not to video card?

Performance — both graphics and general speed — is what’s going to make or break this machine, and the first choice we have to deal with is whether or not to include a video card.

Both consoles (and the Steam Deck) have an integrated CPU (thinking) and GPU (showing) on a fully custom motherboard. This means both the computations and the graphics run on a shared piece of hardware. In a gaming PC, these tend to be separate chips — you have one processor and RAM on the motherboard for the thinky bits, and then an entirely separate card dedicated only to graphics.

For simplicity, cost, and parity, I’d like an integrated CPU that can handle both the computing and the graphics. Any chip like that, however, is going to underperform compared to two separate and dedicated chips. So, for performance and for, you know, reality, I’m going to need a separate video card. I can see my dream of $500 slipping away as I write these sentences.

The issue is that there’s no easy way to directly compare PC benchmarks against console performance. Console hardware is custom-built to run games designed specifically to run on that hardware. And there’s hardware acceleration built into the machine to make those already optimized games run even better.

PCs don’t have that same luxury of optimization because they’re computers first and gaming machines second. SteamOS and the lightweight Arch Linux underneath make the computer part of our fledgling SteamOS computer a little easier to account for, but there are still a lot of performance issues that’ll have to be worked around.

Effectively, I’ll have to build this machine with better parts in order to achieve the same results. The question is, how much better?