NZXT announces Doko, a $100 living room streaming box

PC case maker NZXT is going after PC gaming in the living room with the Doko, a $100 micro-console the company announced on Tuesday. Instead of making a cause for a living room form-factor PC, NZXT threw software and hardware engineering teams at the task of streaming from a desktop PC to a less powerful system in the living room.

At $100, Doko is likely cheaper than the minimum spec PC needed to support Steam in-home streaming in the living room. But it also has a couple drawbacks: latency is a few frames at 50-80 ms over hardline Ethernet, and the streaming is limited to 30 fps. We’ve played around with the Doko a bit pre-release and found some games, like Broforce, easily playable with little perceptible lag. We’ll be testing the Doko more in the coming weeks to see how it stacks up against other living room streaming options.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).