Hi all My kid will get a gaming pc soon. I can't swallow the cost of a whole setup at the moment. I'm thinking of getting a good motherboard with a decent second hand graphics card (a colleague I trust can find me one). And over time upgrade where needed. For monitor I would be using my TV.
Is this a smart idea? We'd have a wireless mouse/keyboard and some table thing to game from the couch.
At the moment my kid is into Roblox and Minecraft, but I assume once his pc can run more; he'll play 'real' games. We are also looking to learn to program (scratch/python). Would that work on a TV?
The TV is an older model (10 years old).
Edit; Thanks everyone for the ideas and advice. We'll try the TV first. And will also look into a steamdeck. It's nice to get such positive feedback from everyone!
Depends on the TV. For gaming, it would be essential that it has some form of gaming/low latency mode.
Also, why would you pay extra for a "good" main board? That's literally the one thing where you can go cheap without a problem if you're not investing in the high-end segments of the other components.
As a sidenote: have you looked at something like a SteamDeck for your kid? It's a full fledged PC that you kid can hook up to the TV and if you want to watch something on it the kiddo can still use it with the build in display. the base model is also dirt cheap for what you get.
Thank you for the motherboard advice. I was under the assumption that it's something you buy once good and it shouldn't change.
I should look into steamdeck. I know nothing about it 😅 Price wise it seems interesting, but that makes me doubt about specs. I'll review some sites and YouTube's to get a good idea of what it can do.
Thanx
Haven't thought on that, but the Steam deck is a great option! OP should consider this!
Although for long term, you get better upgradablity which I think the kid would appreciate if they're into hardware at some point...
I played a lot of Elden Ring with a steam deck plugged into a cheap TV. I wouldn't want to play anything competitively on one, and I wouldn't want to play FPS on it like that, but overall it wasn't bad.
Get the lowest model with a microSD card and go to town for a few hundred bucks. If it's ever not enough it's pretty simple to break one open and replace the drive with a 1TB drive. I have dozens of games installed across microSD cards and shaders filled my drive. Took me about 20 minutes to replace it. Would take someone with no knowledge probably an hour.
Is this a smart idea?
For Roblox and Minecraft, a TV should be perfectly fine and in fact excellent. I will go out on a limb here and say that even for most 'real' games a TV is fine. The latency associated with TVs is most noticeable in FPS games. For other genres like strategy, third-person adventure games etc, I do not think it matters as much if at all. Many people, especially those who have not used a low response / gaming monitor, do not even notice a lag at all (Note: You will find many such people in real life but never ever on the internet). It would be nice of course if your TV had a "Game Mode" which lowers latency, but it may not necessarily be there in a 10-year-old TV (though it was not that uncommon even back then, so do look for it in your TV settings).
Regarding programming on the TV, I think the situation is slightly different. Using small text in general doesn't work for me at all on a TV. Most TVs, other than OLEDs or recent non-OLED ones, don't seem to handle text well enough in my experience. There's either ghosting or some other manner of artifacts which makes the text harder to read compared to a monitor (apart from the distance from TV involved). I commonly see this issue even with office televisions used for mirroring laptop output. Maybe playing around with sharpening and other settings might get it to work well enough though and it really depends on the specific TV in question.
Overall, I feel you should be fine, at least for gaming, but probably for programming as well. I have a couple of gaming rigs hooked up to my living room and bedroom TV's and I quite enjoy gaming on them. The much larger screens and ability to lounge about while gaming more than make up for any perceived or actual lag for me.
I hope your kid and you have a great time with your new setup. Have fun! :)
A TV will do, for a child. He doesn’t NEED anything fancy. Will it be a great experience? Absolutely not. Others here have already gone over the issues. That being said, if cash flow is an issue (relatable), it’ll be fine. Console gamers have been doing it for literal decades. I also used to do it, back when I was a kid, when we had an old 480i TV. Your kid should be grateful that he can play his games. People can spend too much time worrying about not getting the best experience (especially when giving advice to others), when it’s often not needed.
I don't see anyone mentioning it, but TVs differ from Monitors in one major way: the pixel representation on the TV is downsampled. This affects the rendering of text on the screen, but it is usually just the red channels that do this, so the human eye doesn't pick up on it terribly well in most cases.
Personally, I can tell with Windows font rendering on a TV. Windows already uses that weird blue-red shift thingy to anti-alias the fonts and I don't like that either.
All that said... does it matter? No, not at a distance and with the font size jacked up to 200%.
What's the resolution on the TV? I'd think you'd want at least 1080p for it to be effective.