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!

  • WetBeardHairs
    2·
    1 year ago

    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%.