Dual PC Setup Advice

[blakers28]

Hello Everyone!

So I have a dilemma regarding choosing the best option for a 2 pc stream setup or just sticking to 1 device.

 

Gaming PC:

Intel i7 4790K

NVidia GTX 970

32GB RAM

 

Potential Stream PC:

AMD 8350

Avermedia Capture Card
No GPU (Spare Radeon 7970 can be installed)

Internet Speed: Up 25mbps Down 400mbps

 

I have to say that I recently learned that OBS allows you to use Two-pass encoding with NVENC which apparently makes the stream look every bit as good as x264 (CPU rendering). However, I have always wanted to do a 2 PC setup given that you can independently control audio and if your game goes down, your stream will stay up.

What I am looking for are the different options for a 2 PC setup to get the best picture quality stream given the hardware I have. I have done this using Linux which worked great but i prefer to use windows on the 2nd PC to possibly move my audio and tools over and just leave the gaming PC for just that....gaming.

I am not sure If I can use the Radeon 7970 for rendering so I am not sure of any options there.

But I do know that I can do x264 and use the 8350 but then that would likely max out the CPU depending on the CPU preset I use which would leave me with no room to handle my Audio. For Audio I use Adobe Audition as my mixer and Compressor. Voice sounds great but its a little bit of a CPU hog.

Another option I though of is maybe add my 7970 to my gaming rig but then I would lose out on good quality video settings in games.

Can anyone come up with any options either with or without the Radeon GPU or would it be best to just stick to the one PC streaming and use NVENC with Two-Pass encoding?

Im not sure if I am leaving out any important info but any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Arcanekitten]

10 minutes ago, blakers28 said:

-snip-

You would need to install a GPU in the second PC. The FX 8350 doens't have onboard graphics.

Do you already have all the components? (x264 looks better then NVENC or VCE) I've recorded gameplay with the FX 8350 myself and OBS on pretty high settings uses about 30-40% of the CPU, any games I would play had a pretty hard hit on FPS and it really didn't work but as second rendering PC it should work, depending on what Adobe Audition uses .

[blakers28]

Well, when I used Linux with ffmpeg, the FX8350 pretty much did everything and no GPU was installed.. Is there a way to do the same thing using windows sans GPU?

As far as i know I do have the components needed.

[blakers28]

I guess im just a little confused as to why a GPU would be needed if the CPU can just do all the encoding on the 2nd PC.Because right now, I can connect a monitor to the 2nd PC and still get a display. It uses ATI Radeon 3000 Graphics but I most certainly cannot use that to render a thing.

 

I was using this tutorial : https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1988680-broadcasting-with-two-computers and I was hoping I could just do that same thingm just without a GPU on the streaming PC since I want to do x264 encoding.