need a laptop to handle 1080p60 streaming plus a tad more.

rivz · December 5, 2022

as the title states, i’m in search of a laptop that could handle 1080p 60fps encoding plus a little more. a little more being discord, spotify, OBS, and chat client(chatterino) running plus extra stream sources such as chat on screen, music tile, and basic stream alerts. being able to play valorant @ 120~ fps 1080p and running discord simultaneously for travel purposes would be cool but i’m not worried about it too much if it brings the price up a decent amount. this laptop would be for encoding the 1080p 60fps stream coming from my elgato hd60x which would be receiving 1080p 120fps gameplay from my xbox series x and then all the “little more” stuff. this wouldn’t be used to game and stream off the laptop itself ever just one or the other. i would also hope the occasional need to open a browser tab while streaming wouldn’t cripple the performance. i’m not sure if it’s of importance but this would be hooked up to a few devices too such as a usb mic, wired mouse & keyboard, elgato hd60x and a external monitor (laptop screen closed, only outputting video to that monitor). preferably looking for a laptop that runs reasonably cool and won’t turn my small room into a furnace with the series x cranking out tons of heat under load. all i know is my mid 2020 13” intel macbook pro can’t handle these needs reasonably so i’m looking for a temporary solution to do this comfortably until i eventually move to pc. any help at all, insight on what might be a worthy purchase, or what you have that runs these tasks similarly i’d be very interested to hear about. thanks!

this is my first post on the LTT forums, can’t wait to contribute in the future!

porina · December 5, 2022

I'm not familiar with the MBP - did it support GPU encoding? If so, I would have thought it'll be fine. Only gets more questionable if you use CPU encode.

On the streaming laptop, to check my understanding, the main use is the game will not be run on the laptop but captured externally. As such the laptop doesn't really have to do much work as long as you have a GPU encoder. The rest of the stuff isn't a very heavy load. Nvidia GPUs are a safe bet here. I don't know what state the other manufacturers are currently in. I have no idea how demanding Valorant is, or the budget, so you'll have to limit it a bit from there.