Off the shelf living room pc - 4K Kodi / Dolphin

[Tolax]

Hopefully the title says it all. Looking to replace an older Atom based OpenElec kodi unit with something capable of running Kodi 4K/ Dophin / PCSX2. Catalyst is a new 4K TV that is appearing soon.

Unit will be housed in a closed media cabinet so something that runs cool and quiet would be ideal.

I appreciate building a unit from scratch is best/cheapest but if it costs $500 to build a unit and $700 to buy it off the shelf then an off the shelf unit will work (buy unit X and then replace graphics card is fine as well).

I'm planning to run Windows 10 with Kodi being the main front end. If I need to spend more than the numbers listed above that is fine.

Appreciate the help and any suggestions.

Tolax

[Helios]

Hmm, 4k?

Interesting challenge. I was about to just rattle off a generic $350 skylake build that would do general media center things and Dolphin just fine.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/JVyrJx

This might be what you're looking for? Pick your own storage and case. That's entirely personal preference.

Somebody that knows more about GPUs might want to chime in on my choice here. Keep in mind that Dolphin and PCSX2 are fairly efficient with GPU and I think it's mostly bandwidth and VRAM that would matter here. Remember, we're emulating old consoles, not playing the latest Battlefield.

Also, since you're running Windows 10, you can get a lot more graphical performance out of our experimental Direct3D 12 backend, which would definitely make things easier at 4k.