Upgrade question for gaming/streaming

[Manny_NotTheStig]

Hi guys,

I posted this on another forum and thought i should ask here also.
I'm looking to make some changes to my PC setup for better performance when streaming my races (I'm a sim racer, mostly iracing). I was wondering what you guys think makes the best sense for me out the options below.

My current system has a 4790K OCd to 4.6GHz and a GTX 980 Ti with a modest overclock (like 1425MHz or something like that). I currently run triple 1920x1200 monitors (6120x1200 bezel corrected resolution), a fourth 720P monitor for telemetry/OBS, and a 7inch USB monitor for my dashboard.

I can maintain over 60fps when racing, but when I start streaming it harder and sometimes it'll stay in the 40s and have a lot of stuttering depending on the track and number of cars. I'm using QuickSync to encode. I would like to get a GTX 1080Ti to be able to eventually power triple 1080P 144Hz GSync monitors, but I can't afford that at the moment. If I'm able to offload my 980Ti and some other parts I have laying around, maybe I'll be able to buy the 1080Ti. I'm also hoping for price drops with the launch of RX Vega.

In doing some youtube research, I saw that OBS just released a new plugin that allows a second PC on the same network to do the encoding and stream to twitch to free-up resources on your gaming PC.

Does it make any sense to buy once of the prebuilt Dell PCs (something like this http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Optipl...402462&hash=item2f0964f725:g:siYAAOSwQwBZkdAv) for about $200 to be a dedicated stream PC, or should I wait and keep trying to save up for GTX 1080Ti?
Personally, I'm not too fund of having too systems to power and keep track off, but I'm open to the idea. I'm not interested in a GTX 1080 or RX Vega 64 because I want the strongest card for the triple 144Hz monitors later like I mentioned and I don't want buyers remorse if I run into performance issues with those.

Thanks for your replies.

[Guest]

Streaming is on CPU side more, so a multicore cpu would help more than a high end gpu

[PCGuy_5960]

Get a Ryzen 7 1700, it should be much better for streaming

[Colexd]

Yup, just spend the $200 to get a better processor for streaming like the 1700.

[eira]

It'd be much cheaper to buy one of them pre-built Dells, and set up the OBS thing on that. IMO it makes no sense to pour a bunch of money into your system with an R7 and a new mobo to power it. 

[Sanctorum]

47 minutes ago, Colexd said:

Yup, just spend the $200 to get a better processor for streaming like the 1700.

Since when is a Ryzen 7 upgrade $200? R7 1700 alone is $300, then he needs a new mobo and DDR4 RAM, which is $150 at least for 8GB RAM and a mediocre B350 motherboard. Whereas for the same price as just the R7 1700, he could get this;

https://m.newegg.com/combo/combodetail?comboid=3523725&combotype=2

And use that system to stream.

 

Coffee Lake releases soon so it would be worth waiting to see what we get with that and maybe a 6 core Coffee Lake could be a good option. Otherwise an R5 1600 upgrade could be a solid choice.

 

For GPU, you could add a 2nd GTX 980Ti and get similar performance to a 1080Ti. You could get a used 980Ti for <$300 instead of a 1080Ti for $720+. Though if you don't have a motherboard and PSU compatible with SLI 980Ti's, youd probably be better off selling your 980Ti and putting the money towards a 1080Ti. I'd wait until you upgrade monitors to upgrade GPU anyway.

[Colexd]

5 minutes ago, Sanctorum said:

Since when is a Ryzen 7 upgrade $200? R7 1700 alone is $300, then he needs a new mobo and DDR4 RAM, which is $150 at least for 8GB RAM and a mediocre B350 motherboard. Whereas for the same price as just the R7 1700, he could get this;

https://m.newegg.com/combo/combodetail?comboid=3523725&combotype=2

And use that system to stream.

 

Coffee Lake releases soon so it would be worth waiting to see what we get with that and maybe a 6 core Coffee Lake could be a good option. Otherwise an R5 1600 upgrade could be a solid choice.

 

For GPU, you could add a 2nd GTX 980Ti and get similar performance to a 1080Ti. You could get a used 980Ti for <$300 instead of a 1080Ti for $720+. Though if you don't have a motherboard and PSU compatible with SLI 980Ti's, youd probably be better off selling your 980Ti and putting the money towards a 1080Ti. I'd wait until you upgrade monitors to upgrade GPU anyway.

Sorry, maybe that was confusing. I meant that he should just upgrade to 1700 and not spend 200 on another system.

[Manny_NotTheStig]

Thank you very much for the replies.

I've been reluctant to upgrade to whole new chipset/platform because of the cost involved as i will also need new ddr4 ram in addition to mobo and cpu. I had strongly considered the Ryzen 1700 at launch i wasn't convinced the upgrade was worth it. Also, i use QuickSync which i believe runs off the igpu on the intel chip - one of the reasons i didnt go with Ryzen. 

The advice i got previously was that i should upgrade my gpu, since even though there'll always be some performance loss with streaming (regardless of the cpu), a stronger gpu will produce more fps and therfore place the net fps within my target. So i started shooting for a 1080Ti with anticipation for triple 144Hz monitors. Please let me know if this assumption is false.

Also I'd like to avoid SLI if i can. I had issues with my gtx 680 sli setup and decided I'd only do single gpu setups going forward, if i can help it.

I haven't listed my 980ti for sale but that's what my intention is. 

I'm interested to see the performance of the 6 core Coffee lake to see if that would be worth a full platform upgrade at that time.

 

Also, the link above got messed up. Here's the prebuilt i was looking at

http://www.ebay.com/itm/202021074725

[Manny_NotTheStig]

How strong of an nvidia card do you need to run NVENC? Also how much of the work really gets offloaded from the cpu to the gpu?
Just wondering because i have a gtx 650ti laying around here somewhere i could use only for obs encoding and hopefully my gtx 980ti can concentrate only on the games.