What Kind of PC Do You Need for Streaming?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
975 words · ~4 min read
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so you're a seasoned pc gamer wondering how to make your gaming experience more
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social but without inviting people into
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your house then you get the utterly unique and
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one-of-a-kind idea to start streaming your gameplay you spring into action
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preparing to show your battle station off to the world but what kind of setup
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do you need to pull this off well hey guys
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it shouldn't be surprising but an upper range gaming pc is often a good choice
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for streaming but there are hardware considerations for streaming that are a
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little bit different typically gaming setups are built around
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the GPU with your graphics card often being the deciding factor in how nice
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your games will look as long as the rest of your rig meets some kind of minimum
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threshold but for streaming your CPU can
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determine how your gameplay looks to your viewers be they on twitch or
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another streaming platform but why is this
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i mean we're still talking about how to get the best graphical quality right
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well remember that the work of rendering the game that is the act of actually
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creating the image has already been done by your graphics card it's then your CPU
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that takes that rendered image and transcodes it into a video format that
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can be easily sent over the internet and displayed by your viewers web browsers
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and if you've ever edited video regularly you'll probably already know
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that having a more powerful CPU typically makes video encoding a much
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easier job now since transcoding is easily split
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amongst multiple CPU cores oh by the way
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don't forget you still have to run the game too it is to your advantage to get
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a CPU with more cores and more threads
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especially if you want to stream at 1080p 60fps instead of 720p
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though it should be noted that as with anything there is a point of diminishing
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returns and an 18 core processor might not be worth the extra price if you want
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a specific recommendation a modern 6 core core i7 or more or AMD ryzen 7
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processor or better in your gaming rig should make it a very capable streaming
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machine some streamers though actually decide to go a step further and use a
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second pc to handle all the streaming tasks using their first rig strictly for
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actual gaming this can especially make sense if you
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already have an older tower lying around because it's a great way to stream
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CPU-intensive games like starcraft or
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total war without being concerned that your gameplay or your stream quality
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will suffer as a result and one of the reasons this approach is so popular is
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that your streaming pc doesn't have to be anything super fancy you might not
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even need a dedicated graphics card you will need a good CPU
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but because it's going to be handling streaming only you can probably get away
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with a more basic four core four thread processor just make sure that you close
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all your background programs and have only what you need to stream up and
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running if you're running into trouble the other thing you'll need for your
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dedicated streaming pc is a way to capture the video output from your
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gaming machine and deliver it to the software that will encode and transmit
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your stream along with any overlays and transitions that you desire
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for pc gamers this can actually be done over your local network using the nvenc
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hardware encoding engine behind NVIDIA's shadow play feature to send up to a 60
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megabit stream of the game over Ethernet to your secondary box where CPU encoding
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will turn it into a high quality 5.5 megabit stream compatible with twitch tv
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but if your pc hardware doesn't support
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this method or if you're streaming from another device like a game console
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the go to is a capture card a modern usb
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3 or pci express capture card will help prevent transmission problems and lag
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compared to a usb 2 capture card but other than that you'll probably have to
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read or watch reviews to determine exactly which model is best for your
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needs whatever you get though make sure that it supports the resolution and
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frame rate that you want to broadcast
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this episode was brought to you by tunnelbear the easy to use vpn app when
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people are shopping for a vpn one of the features they look for is called a kill
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switch before you connect to your network your device actually starts to
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send information about itself and what it wants to do and it tries to establish
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connections with all sorts of things and there are other devices trying to
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connect to yours kill switches stop all this from happening before you connect
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to your vpn all your traffic is unencrypted too so in the few seconds it
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takes to connect you've probably already broadcast your ip maybe a few dns
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requests or even a search query vigilant bear from tunnelbear stops this
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from happening by blocking all outbound and inbound traffic so nothing leaks out
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before you connect this helps keep you private throughout your entire
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connection time and if your connection goes down for some reason vigilant bear
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kicks back in and stops the traffic again until the connection comes back
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for a free trial of tunnel bear go to tunnelbear.com Linus we're going to have
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that linked below so thanks for watching guys like dislike
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