What to upgrade for streaming??

BigheadTV · August 7, 2018

Hey guys, knowing somewhat about computers, having an issue on deciding what to upgrade to help with better performance in-game while live streaming at the same time. So as of right now in my current build from ibuypower PC that i purchased in late 2015; GTX 970 GPU, i7-4790k CPU, 16GB DDR3 1600mhz RAM, 2TB HDD, no SSD (i had no idea what that was at the time because this was my first PC purchase lol so i didnt bother) <---- a decent mistake, realizing how important SSD's are now.... Anyways, would it be silly for me to upgrade to a 1070ti & not worry about anything else atm? Would that cause a bottle-neck? Basically im just trying to pull better FPS out of games while streaming so its not so sluggish when streaming at the same time as gaming. Or, should i look into investing into a completely new build? I know that if I wanted to upgrade my CPU, since its lga 1150, i would have to purchase a new mobo, ram, etc. (basically a fresh new build at that point). Im not completely new to PC's as i grew alot more interested into them since i got my first PC back in fall of 2015. Any tips/advice on my current situation? Any feedback & help is appreciated! Thanks!!

WereCat · August 7, 2018

Depends...

Streaming by using x264 with CPU will definitely give you the highest quality but since its quite demanding on the CPU, you will have to upgrade.

You can use NVENC x264 on your GPU which will affect the performance only a little bit but for streaming you need to use low bitrates which will affect the quality quite a lot, but it should be watchable still... At 720p.

For no performance hit you can use iGPU with Intel QuickSync but that will be the lowest quality of these three options. Still, it should be very usable at 720p.

Shimejii · August 7, 2018

You can make it work by using the NVEC encoder (using your GPU as the main streaming device) since you CPU would be a bit of a mess if it was doing most of the work.

Are you sure you want to stream? It takes a few thousand hours of streaming consistently just to get off a few 10's of viewers if your lucky. Dont expect anything from it. Coming from someone who has done Youtube and streaming for the past 4 years