OBS NDI Recording -- thoughts?

[An0maly_76]

As MaximBady might say... "SOOOOOOO.... What is going on HERE?!"

 

I hail from the old days of MS-DOS and 80x86 processors, DIP switches, IRQ juggling, and IDE-E. In those days, I was a whiz. Nowadays, not so much.

Long story short, in 2018, I got interested in doing gameplay videos. I came into possession of a starter rig with a Ryzen 7-1700, 8GB RAM, a GT1030, and a 2 TB HDD. It did BeamNG.drive, GTA V, and American Truck Simulator quite well considering, until some building issues with BeamNG.drive got me thinking it might be time to upgrade. After much research, for $500, I got a 1TB WD Blue M.2 SSD, 32GB Crucial Ballistix RAM, and an Asus TUF Gaming GTX1650 Super 4GB OC. No flames, upgrading my 500W power supply wasn't an option and it's actually a good bang for the buck, loads better than the GT1030.

 

Hiccups notwithstanding, after the cussing, fussing and dust cleared, my boot time dropped from 2:49 to 1:12 -- roughly 47% faster, and the machine ran quite a bit faster overall. Once I figured out a few things, my graphics were much, much better. However, the GTX1650, even being a Super, is pegged at 97%, and even OBS glitches a bit and appears to be cutting resolution to 33% recording from ATS. I had purchased a new 5900X in the hopes of gathering the pieces together to do another blitz upgrade, until MSI told me my 2018 model B450 would likely fry with the necessary BIOS update.

This was already going to be expensive enough, now it appears I have to spend at least another $3000 to accomplish my objective, and it's not an option. Quite honestly, I'm fairly happy with my machine, I feel it delivers an awesome bang for the buck, and I simply can't justify $1500-$2200 for the RTX3060-3090 series. The RTX2060-2080 cards in the $600-$800 don't seem to be worth it over the 1650 either. And besides, LTT seems very big on turning some very unlikely candidates into surprise power players. Which is something I can definitely dig -- If I can make this work with my current gaming setup, I can tell people, "See? You don't need a 5900X or an RTX3090 to play this game well.."

 

So then I recently discovered the trick of using EtherNet to mirror to a second machine for streaming. Why didn't I know this sooner? And here is where I start asking questions. Is this method also suitable for recording video for editing before upload? I've been told that 4 cores and 8 threads are necessary for this to work well. Not a problem, even that is cheaper than the alternative. However...

 

I have a Lenovo M71E workstation that might be able to handle this, but with two shortcomings -- I believe it has either the i3-2100, or the i5-2500, which could be a little lacking on power. Unsure of RAM capacity, I believe it has 4-8GB. It is also a SFF workstation, and unlikely to accept a GPU. It also currently runs Ubuntu Linux, which would likely have to go. Also, it has been sitting for a long time in less than ideal conditions, thus I am not sure it is even operable.

 

I have found some nice machines online for a great price with 6 core / 12 thread processing @ 2.9 Ghz, 8GB RAM with a 256GB SSD and, you guessed it, a GTX1650. While it seems this machine is capable of NDI recording with OBS, I want to be certain. Thoughts?

Edited January 23, 2022 by An0maly_76
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[Kilrah]

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