So the pc I have on my TV to play all my movies youtube and anime as well as casual web browsing is pretty much what ever my old gaming pc was. Currently its an i7 with an evga 970gtx in it. For the past year I want to say it developed a strange lockup that can happen randomly between 1 to 24 hours of being on. I am currently running an old 460 in it to rule out the video card but I suspected the video card because in all cases just hitting the reset button was NOT able to recover the video. And initial HD activity tells me the pc is posting far enough to get to windows startup, but does not complete it.
I do have a 1080gtx boxed up but I don't really want to throw operation hours on such a valuable backup card that won't be used for any kind of gaming. So I am trying to figure out what to do if i deem the 970 needs to be replaced. While the graphics card market is recovering it is still pretty bad, especially for low end cards. It is actually worse however if you are looking to build a pc as I considered replacing my cpu/mobo with a new cpu and use an iGPU solution, but the cost of doing that will be several hundreds even for low end processors. I took a peek at EVGAs b-stock and saw that 1030 for $100. being a HTPC the passive version is what caught my eye.
Do you think this is my most cost effective solution? 700s just seem too old and the 1630 is just silly amounts of money at $200.