Steam Link

[A Black Falcon]

I've mentioned the Hori EX2 Turbo controller before, but it's a wired (with a long ~10 foot cord) X360-compatible pad that only released in Japan and is not cheap, I paid $40-$50 for one on ebay and I think I got a good price. It has six face buttons, which is the number one thing I like about it; I believe it's the only dual-analog 360/xinput controller with six face buttons, all other six-button pads are digital-only dpad or fightstick things. Those are great, but I want a controller with analog and six face buttons and this is it.

And fortunately, since it's from Hori, it's also a fairly high-quality controller that works well. It's not quite as sleek-feeling as official MS 360 controllers, but it looks nice enough and works great.

As for this device, it's duplicating the screen in software rather than using an additional hardware output which wouldn't tax the system. I've seen these, and they do present some hiccups.

It makes sense that they're just duplicating the screen instead of rendering everything again, but regardless of the reasons -- distance, etc -- I definitely noticed slowdown and such on the Steam Link in some games, particularly higher-performance things like fighting games, than those same games have on regular PC.

I'm fortunate in that I've got a video card with just way too many video ports on it. Down the line, once I get a modern TV with "game mode" in it for reduced latency, I intend to get a HDMI cable running out of one of those additional ports to that TV for that nice "set top box" experience.

Unless your TV and computer are pretty close together, though, just using an HDMI cable probably often is not much of an option. My computer and TV areas are not really far apart, but they are definitely too far apart to just run a cable from the computer to the television. (I also don't have extra outputs on my video card, it has two outputs and I have two monitors attached to it, but that's another issue.)

I might even get a wireless mouse and keyboard.

Yeah. You can go to your Windows desktop in the Steam Link, but this requires a mouse to operate obviously, requiring either a mouse or Steam Controller since that can emulate a mouse, though I don't know how well. And yeah, as much as I prefer it wired isn't a great option for a mouse and keyboard in the living room, so If I use this thing much I'll definitely need to do something like that as well.