Repurposing old pc as a dedicated streaming pc

[oseanfox]

Budget (including currency): 500 USD

Country: United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Streaming to twitch from OBS @ 1080p 60, Discord, iTunes

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

Recently we put my father in a nursing home for dementia related reasons. I took home his pc with the thought of using it for parts for a dedicated streaming pc, to take some of the load off of my gaming pcs CPU. When I opened it up I was surprised that while the parts were outdated it was a pretty solid build. It had a MSI Tomahawk b350, an AMD Ryzen 7 1800x, a GTX 1050, and 32 gb of ram. The 1050 was causing problems so I switched it out for an rx580 my friend had and for the most part the build has been running well. However in my streams there has been a lot of crackling in my audio when I try to stream at 1080p 60. When I stream at 720p 60 it pretty much only happens during transitions. I dont hear the audio crackling but my stream does. I'm wondering if its too much for the CPU to handle and if upgrading to a B450 or B550 board with a Ryzen 5 3600 would give me a performance benefit worth the cost. 

 

My OBS encoding settings for stream are

Encoder: x264

Preset: Very Fast

Rate Control: CBR

Bitrate: 6000

Keyframe Interval: 2

 

[Pixelfie]

I would recommend upgrading to an RTX gpu, 1650 Super or 1660 Super depending on how bad GPU prices are where you live. They have a better encoder which should give both better quality and use less CPU. I don't think your CPU is causing the issues, I used a Pentium N4200 for the same purpose and it worked flawlessly.

[oseanfox]

2 minutes ago, Pixelfie said:

I would recommend upgrading to an RTX gpu, 1650 Super or 1660 Super depending on how bad GPU prices are where you live. They have a better encoder which should give both better quality and use less CPU. I don't think your CPU is causing the issues, I used a Pentium N4200 for the same purpose and it worked flawlessly.

From my understanding if the pc is a dedicated streaming pc x264 is the preferable encoder to NVENC. To clarify I'm running a 2 pc setup. My old pc is handling the load from the game while this one is encoding the stream.

[Pixelfie]

5 minutes ago, oseanfox said:

From my understanding if the pc is a dedicated streaming pc x264 is the preferable encoder to NVENC. To clarify I'm running a 2 pc setup. My old pc is handling the load from the game while this one is encoding the stream.

Yes, but to get the nvenc encoder you need one of these GPU's. Your CPU isn't great, but should be good enough for streaming.

[oseanfox]

1 minute ago, Pixelfie said:

Yes, but to get the nvenc encoder you need one of these GPU's. Your CPU isn't great, but should be good enough for streaming.

Sorry yes I realize that I need an NVIDIA card to use NVENC, but I'm encoding with x264 because it provides a better picture that NVENC and AMF and the cpu should be able to handle the encoding if it's not also trying to render my game.

[YoungBlade]

The CPU shouldn't be an issue. I have an old Xeon workstation that I've used as a stream machine. It has an X5650 (6c/12t, 3.1GHz boost) which is even slower than a Ryzen 5 1600. The GPU is a Quadro 600, which is basically on par with a GT 710. Granted, the streams have been 30fps, not 60fps, but your computer should be more than powerful enough.

[oseanfox]

Figured out what was causing my audio issues! My USB hubs are overloaded. The older motherboard cant handle my hd60s, camlink, audio interface, and usb headphones at the same time. While on stream today I unplugged the camlink just to try it and all the crackling stopped. So from this point my options are a pcie usb expansion, a new motherboard, or swap the hd60s for one of elgatos pcie capture cards instead. Thanks for the help!