Steam Link

[Samwise]

I'd been curious about the Link for a while and when it went on sale for $5 I grabbed one.  Here's my review.

tl;dr: it works fine. 

If you have a setup like mine where your PC and your TV are in different rooms and you don't want to run HDMI and USB cables through your house, it's a great solution.  I have wired ethernet so YMMV if you do it all over wifi, but I can't detect any latency between the controller and the display (which is a full round trip from the controller to the Link to the PC to the Link to the TV).  No lagging/tearing whatsoever on the display in full resolution.

The Link has a few USB ports so you can use any USB keyboard, mouse, controller, etc with it and they work as if plugged into your PC.

There's some very minor UI weirdness with remotely controlling your PC -- I have to remember to go and unlock my PC before firing up the Link, and if I turn the Link off while a game is still running then it keeps running on the PC instead of exiting.  In between startup and shutdown I haven't had any problems though.

You can't use the Link to control your desktop, but you can add useful apps like VLC to Steam and project them onto your TV that way.  I've found this pretty useful for watching movies that I've obtained through entirely legitimate means.

That said, if you already have a setup where you can easily plug your PC directly into your TV, I don't think the Link is gonna add any value.