All in one PC, or two seperate PC's?

Mr RX · August 1, 2017

G'day everyone!

I was hoping for opinions from people more knowledgeable than myself (and more importantly up to date with whats coming up in the next 6 months) about how to best use my budget for a new PC/S for my desired use case. The TL;DR version is Streaming games + capturing them and editing them for youtube upload with a $3000/$3500 budget.

Now, originally I was looking at the new intel 2066 platform and could come up with a very nice x299 motherboard with 32 gigs of 3000mhz ram, base i7 4 core 8 thread and lots of SSD's and NVME's in raid with a nice 10 bit 100% RGB widescreen 4k monitor for basically right on my budget depending on what GPU i get (1060 would be minimum but i could squeeze in a 1080 if i shop around)

But then I started to think, well thats complete overkill for gaming, so its basically purely for the content creation side of things. but the more I think about it, the more i realize for what i will ACTUALLY use it for (regular youtube video editing with some basic use of SFX and maybe some animation and ofcourse the game capture from the gaming PC and then streaming it) its even overkill for that. The reason why i was looking at the 2066 platform was to get a basic setup so i have room for upgrades. But really if im spending $3000+ on a setup, its likely i will be using it for 3-5 years before i upgrade anyway, and we will likely have a new platform again.

So now i'm wondering, is my money best spent on 2 PCs? Maybe i can build a dirt cheap AMD setup with the new thread ripper for gaming and buy a much cheaper 1151 z270 setup which would still be fine for the kind of content creation I would be doing? I wouldn't need a high end GPU for rendering as most of the videos would be 5-15mins long and wouldn't need to be rendered out in record speeds anyway. As long as i have a decent GPU I'm sure the render times and timeline scrubbing would be of satisfactory levels for an entry level youtuber like I wish to concentrate on becoming.

So I guess my final question is asking if this was your money, what would you do? Is it even possible to build 2 PC's for $3500? (with the need for double the expensive things like motherboards, CPUS and power supplys and monitors?) Any advice would be greatly appreciated

*** edit *** I am so sorry, I do not know how I missed the big bold "New Builds and Planning" section. Any chance someone could kindly move this there? Again I apologize.

Edited August 1, 2017 by Mr RX

Technomancer__ · August 1, 2017

13 minutes ago, Mr RX said:

*** edit *** I am so sorry, I do not know how I missed the big bold "New Builds and Planning" section. Any chance someone could kindly move this there? Again I apologize.

yea a moderator can move it like @TheRandomness

Technomancer__ · August 1, 2017

i suggest you get a 1700 or 1700x and oc it. i suggest it with the asus prime x370 mobo

and get a very good gpu like a 1080ti or even sli with a very good monitor

8 cores and 16 threads are enough to capture games while playing

and premiere (the editing software you are probably using doesn't scale above 8 cores 16 threads)

TheRandomness · August 1, 2017

-Thread moved to New Builds and Planning.

brob · August 1, 2017

I would stick with a single system to handle the described work.

If the purchase window is the next month or so then an R7 1700 or 1700X on an X370 motherboard probably makes the most sense. Overclocked it would provide excellent gaming with horsepower to spare for capture. It would also be very capable in video editing and other content creation.

The expectation is that sometime in the next six months Intel will be releasing Coffee Lake, the next generation LGA1151 desktop cpu. Rumours are that it will include six-core, probably hyperthreaded cpu. Intel is claiming 30% better performance over Skylake-S. It this is borne out in post release benchmarks this might be a very nice fit for your needs.

Threadripper is expected in the next two weeks. It will be interesting to see the benchmarks. I don't think the cpu would be a good fit. It is more akin to the upper end X299 processors. Which I agree is overkill.