'Sup brethren, thinking about upgrading my steam streamer PC. Just fitted it into a new HTPC case that supports full ATX PSU's and thrown in my spare Silverstone 500W Bronze unit, and put in my 8GB RAM kit I had going spare. Thinking about either upgrading the CPU to an i3 of some sort, or adding a GPU. As it stands all its used for is Steam In-Home Streaming and streaming through my Bintube account. Steam In-Home Streaming benefits from a stronger piece of hardware for decoding purposes, so I'm looking at either getting an i3 (Haswell Refresh, looking at the 3.6Ghz model with 3MB cache) for the 2c/4t option of DXVA decoding, OR getting hold of a GTX 750 low profile and using the NVENC decoding option NVidia can provide. They both cost pretty much the same, £90, and will both be used for essentially the same thing. Catch is it might potentially be used for games as a standalone system, as opposed to a streaming client so it's not hogging my PC hardware to process games. So it would need a dedicated GPU for that kind of light gaming. On the other hand, while the GTX 750 is a faster decoder, the decoded video stream is slightly lower quality than using an x86 DXVA decoder with the i3 which provides better quality video.
You might say "why not both, they're so cheap" but this month I've got to renew car insurance, buy a new hoover (a decent one!), and possibly a new washing up bowl and dish drainer because the bowl is cracked and I cut myself on this crappy metal drainer and plates don't stay stood up properly. So, it's one or t'other.
