Comment by trey-jones
21 hours ago
I have a server running in my basement with 2 nvidia Tesla GPUs that I bought for ~$70 each on ebay. (Unfortunately the RAM cost an arm and a leg). I built it for inference, but I also set it up to run sunshine server and now I have my Steam library on the TV through a Raspberry Pi 3. Even better, it was a fun and interesting project, maybe not as straightforward as you think. Unfortunately it's entirely possible that it costs .24/hr just for the electricity.
Now, this feels fine with <10ms input latency over wifi. Even in 2026 I'm skeptical about sending my input to Atlanta and back.
> Unfortunately it's entirely possible that it costs .24/hr just for the electricity
Of course you don't need 2x teslas just to stream a game to your living room - a relatively power-efficient streaming box is possible
The raspberry pi is the actual device hooked up to the TV I think, the GPUs are elsewhere in the house.
The game runs on that pc in basement
Yes, I understand that. My point is that 2x Teslas are overkill for gaming - his power bill is so high because he's using an expensive ML inference box to stream games.
Unless it’s a dumb TV you can just install the Steam app on your TV and avoid Sunshine and the Pi all together.
Are you locked into steam then? Or can you use it to stream other games, e.g. stuff bought on GOG?
Steam can stream any game, but non-Steam games do need to be set up on the computer to launch through Steam to work properly.
Except we literally just had stories about ... LG, was it? ... spying on everything - and the obvious way for that to happen is to plug your TV into the internet.
Correct, it was LG — though I see no reason to assume that other smart-TV manufacturers aren't doing similar things. Perhaps not quite as egregiously as LG, where the TV's microphone was picking up conversations in the room even when the TV appeared to be off (but was actually in standby mode). But I would assume that if a smart TV from any brand is connected to the net, it's transmitting data home about what you watch, what ads you sat through vs fast-forwarded, and so on.