2nd Hand capable as a Dedicated Streaming PC?

[Baeger]

Hi all

My friend's selling me his rig, and I just want to check that it's actually worth it.  He's letting me set it up and try it out and if it's no good he said he'll take it back but I just want to check what's possible with the parts.

I want a dedicated streaming PC to go alongside my gaming PC.  I use the NDI plugin for OBS right now with my laptop but the laptop isn't amazing for encoding to Twitch.   Any advice? Any potential issues? any areas to improve on?

 

i5-3570k

8gb Corsair Vengeance DDR3

Standard 1TB HDD (looking to get an SSD, dw)

AMD Sapphire 6850 (he also has a GTX980 available for extra)

650w 80 Plus power supply (make unknown at this time)

[Streetguru]

10 minutes ago, Baeger said:

 

You shouldn't need a dedicated streaming PC, just use NVENC in OBS to stream using your GPU.

[Baeger]

1 minute ago, Streetguru said:

You shouldn't need a dedicated streaming PC, just use NVENC in OBS to stream using your GPU.

I do, but I want to completely minimise the load on my gaming PC as much as possible.  I play a lot of games where the FPS difference streaming vs not streaming can be huge sometimes.  It depends on the game of course though.

[Streetguru]

4 minutes ago, Baeger said:

I do, but I want to completely minimise the load on my gaming PC as much as possible.  I play a lot of games where the FPS difference streaming vs not streaming can be huge sometimes.  It depends on the game of course though.

Then just get a cheap R7 1700 machine to do the streaming workload, but the impact should be pretty minimal with NVENC, an i5 isn't going to be too great, especially if you're doing 1080p 60fps streaming.

[Baeger]

2 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Then just get a cheap R7 1700 machine to do the streaming workload, but the impact should be pretty minimal with NVENC, an i5 isn't going to be too great, especially if you're doing 1080p 60fps streaming.

Well what I should have included is the price.  I'm paying $105 for the whole thing.  In terms of value, is it more worth it? Or would I be better off just splurging out a bit more cash for a new build with an R7?

[Streetguru]

2 minutes ago, Baeger said:

Well what I should have included is the price.  I'm paying $105 for the whole thing.  In terms of value, is it more worth it? Or would I be better off just splurging out a bit more cash for a new build with an R7?

You could buy it and just steal the case/hard drive/GPU/PSU or use it in the mean time, but it's doubtful that it'll have the performance needed.

[Baeger]

9 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

You could buy it and just steal the case/hard drive/GPU/PSU or use it in the mean time, but it's doubtful that it'll have the performance needed.

Is the GPU really going to make much of a difference for encoding? Obviously, it's just the ATI 6850 is pretty damn outdated but a GTX980 is also available but if it's gunna make little impact I'll stick with the ATI 6850

 

[Streetguru]

1 minute ago, Baeger said:

Is the GPU really going to make much of a difference for encoding? Obviously, it's just the ATI 6850 is pretty damn outdated but a GTX980 is also available but if it's gunna make little impact I'll stick with the ATI 6850

 

Probably just grab the 980, but it's because the Ryzen 8 core doesn't have an iGPU, so you just need something to output with.

 

R7 1700s are going on crazy sales currently, can just run one in a cheap ASrock Pro 4 board, maybe 350 GBP for that whole upgrade with 16Gbs of 3000mhz or better RAM.

[Baeger]

3 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Probably just grab the 980, but it's because the Ryzen 8 core doesn't have an iGPU, so you just need something to output with.

 

R7 1700s are going on crazy sales currently, can just run one in a cheap ASrock Pro 4 board, maybe 350 GBP for that whole upgrade with 16Gbs of 3000mhz or better RAM.

Oh wow, that sounds like a really good deal!  Thank you!