Crowcore

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

There's no "best settings" or "universal" settings, it depends from content to content.
 
Every option is a trade off between disk space used by the encoding and the quality.
 
For example, you can improve quality by setting tune film and therefore applying a mild deblocking, but you could get much higher quality increase by changing the constant quality factor from 12 to 11 (in Handbrake, I'm not sure how the slider changes the number, but in x264 smaller numbers means higher quality and more disk space used, higher numbers means sacrifice quality to reduce disk space) ,,, basically the more you get closer to placebo quality, you use more disk space.
 
The film tune does that deblocking thing which helps the encoder retain a bit more quality in the same amount of disk space (if you keep every other option constant). So if you're constrained by some things (for example your video must have a bitrate of 6 mbps or less), then it makes sense to enable that if it helps with more quality.
It's mostly for movies sources that are already in high bitrate, high quality like bluray copies, or movies you shot with your digital camera with 25mbps or higher bitrates.
 
Tune film may also help with some games that don't have sharp edges and large areas of color or very sudden changes in colors.
If you have a movie with lots of grain or that are lower quality than tune film may not help you.
 
tune animation can be helpful for anime, manga and for some games that simulate that effect (cell shading, i'm thinking borderlands, or games like worms reloaded, or games with pixel art
 
At that RF number (12), using preset veryslow won't give so much increase in quality to be worth it. You could speed up encodings by taking it down a notch to "slower" - the biggest change between slower and veryslow is the number of reference frames, from 8 to 16 ... but most content will never have more than around 10 reference frames, so probably 9n0% of the time, the encoder will try pointlessly to use more than 8 reference frames and slow down encoding with minimal benefit.
 
encoder profile set to HIGH can help at 720p or higher encodings, it gives the encoder the ability to use more "tricks" to retain more quality in the amount of disk space you use.
Encoder level 4.0 is ok for 720p or lower, but if you want higher resolution, you should set it to 5.0 or something like that, which would work for 1080p or higher. Most video cards can decode level 5.0 videos (or even higher level videos) in hardware. 
Level 4 restricts the maximum bitrate to 20mbps so if you have some very high motion scenes with explosions or something, at that CRF 12 you could have a second or so of video which could have a lower quality than possible because you're restricting the maximum bitrate to 20 mbps.
Level 4.2 allows up to 1080p and 50mbps and level 5 allows up to 135 mbps
 
so yeah, slower , high profile , level 4 or 4.1 for 720p or less,  4.2 for 720p or less than 1080p , level 5 for 1080p, play with CRF setting until you find the amount of disk space per minute you're comfortable with.
And if it's something you want to upload to youtube, just use as much bitrate you're willing to upload, youtube will recompress the content anyway.
If it's for your archive, 10 bit versions of x264 will produce slightly more quality for the same amount of disk space, but video cards can't decode such content in hardware so your movie player will use the processor to decode the movie (which is not a problem) and some TVs won't play back 10bit encoded videos (with h264).
 
 
 

It's not really as simple as "this will give you higher quality".
 
RF is when you tell the encoder "this is the quality I want. You figure out how big the file is".
Average bitrate is you telling the encoder "this is the file size I want. You figure out how good the quality will be".
 
Changing to x265 will not affect the RF or average bitrate values.
 
 
 
What you should do is experiment a bit with the different encoder presets. What they will do is trade CPU time for smaller file size or higher quality.
Something encoded with "slower" will look better, be smaller or a combination of both compared to something encoded with "faster".
 
RF and a slow preset -> The encoder will be able to achieve the set quality with fewer bits. The end result is a smaller file (compared to with a faster preset).
 
Average Bitrate and slow preset -> The encoder will spend the bits you have given it, but since each bit will contribute more to the image the end result is that the video looks better (compared to with a faster preset).

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

What exactly do you plan to use this build for? That's important to give advice with.

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

Well an RX 570 8GB will still be fine for 1080p high settings if you're only gaming at 60hz for now. It has like 70% of the 1660ti's performance at $140

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077VX31FZ?tag=pcpapi-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1

Sounds like a CPU or RAM bottleneck. What processor do you have & how much RAM?

Sounds like a CPU or RAM bottleneck. What processor do you have & how much RAM?

Do you really need that kind of CPU power? What do you intend on doing besides gaming? It's multiple times the performance of your current one. The fastest 8 core CPU only to run games seems like a waste.
 
I don't believe we will have a new Nvidia GPU gen before Q2. And with Nvidia at launch you rarely get more performance for the same money anyway. I wouldn't wait.
 
For the SSD, it depends for crucial RAID 0 is for you. It you work on very critical projects and never back-up, then I guess it makes sense... If you are a pretty normal user, than no, go for just one drive.

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^

My little brother used to think that the more data you store on an HDD, the heavier the component gets. He also thought that if you pivot the monitor clockwise during a transfer of files or an installation, it would go faster because the gravity would help the loading bar fill faster...^^