My living room hasn’t been a particularly exciting place beyond watching sports and the occasional show, and part of that has to do with the lack of options for my TV. It has that standard Roku operating system, which lends it well to general entertainment, but isn’t great for much else.

I’ve always wanted to put together a true HTPC, but always lacked the parts to put one together. My fiancée didn’t particularly love the idea of having a chunky computer chassis at the center of our living room, and I lacked the ITX parts to make one small enough to fit somewhere out of sight. Even still, I took my old desktop rig, and with the right case, turned it into a centerpiece that fits into my living room instead of being an eyesore.

The starting parts

Tied together with a minimalist case

The parts selection was essentially just the entirety of my old main workstation and gaming rig. For the CPU, it’s a Intel Core i7-10700K, which runs relatively cool and will have no problem staying that way at stock with the Thermalright Peerless Assassin cooling it.

The GPU, albeit, maybe a little overkill for this setup, is an EVGA FTW3 RTX 3080. This is probably my favorite GPU of all time, and while I was ready to retire it as a display piece, it gets another lease on life in this rig. When I was running it, it had a VBIOS that cranked the max TDP to well above stock, and I would turn the power limit well above 100% to squeeze more frames out of it, but in this application it just needed to be cool and quiet, so I turned the power limit down to 85% and tuned the fan curves for silence. This should still give it more than enough performance headroom to run most games at 4K 60FPS.

The other parts were pretty much exactly as they were originally: an ASUS Prime board, 32 GB of DDR4 and a 1 TB NVMe SSD.

The case was a crucial part of the build, because I really didn’t want this thing to be an eyesore. Seeing as these are ATX parts, I looked for an ATX case first, and the Fractal North in the white colorway ended up being perfect. The wood on the front accents well with the other wood in the room, and the white blends in well. Turning off the RGB inside means that you really hardly notice it, it just blends in.

Additions to make it living room friendly

Controllers, Bluetooth, and the OS are crucial

Making a standard PC into a living-room-friendly device isn’t as simple as running an HDMI cord and firing it up. For initial setup, I needed a wireless keyboard and mouse, and then to actually play games and navigate menus from the couch, a controller was required. Xbox controllers are typically better supported by Windows, especially if you want to use multiple with the Xbox Wireless Adapter dongle, so I went with one of those, with plans to add others later.

Adding a Bluetooth receiver was also crucial for getting audio devices and other types of controllers connected if needed. For networking, I just ran a long cable back to my main switch, as this motherboard doesn’t come with a Wi-Fi card.

Windows is the choice of OS here, not because it’s the best choice, but because I want my family to maintain the ability to fix small issues as they arrise, instead of always being on-call for the living room Linux PC when it inevitably doesn’t run a game they want to play.

Eventually, once support gets a little better, running SteamOS will probably be what I end up doing, but for now, Windows is fine. The OS can be logged in automatically, and Steam can be set to open Big Picture at boot, making it a mostly seamless process. There is the occasional time that something will steal window focus from the Big Picture window, and I’ll need to grab the mouse to fix that, but otherwise it works great.

Why not just buy a console?

Limits, mainly

Besides already having the internal hardware lying around, one might suggest going with a console might be a better use of the space. It’d be a bit smaller, easier to “fit” into a room, and offer a slightly more seamless experience, but you’d also lose freedom. With a PC, I can use it for much more than just gaming, and I have full control over everything on the system, whereas with a console, you’re at the mercy of the manufacturer and developers.

In terms of what I’d change, I’ll probably eventually swap these parts out for ITX ones, and maybe splurge on a really nice ITX chassis that blends in even better, but for now, this will do just fine.

A living room PC can be a game-changer

Turning my old gaming PC into a living-room centerpiece has genuinely changed how I use my space. What used to be a room reserved for streaming sports and the occasional Netflix night has become one of the more versatile parts of my home. It’s not perfect, and I’d love to eventually go smaller with an ITX setup, but for now, it’s proof that with the right case and a little creativity, even a bulky old PC can feel right at home beside your TV.