What kind of Hardware do I need to stream/record 2 instances of OBS at the same time?

for7hyp3 · November 6, 2018

My friend works with a company that does A/V for events and he recently built a streaming/recoding box for broadcasting these events on Twitch. Now he's wanting to run 2 instances of OBS on the same machine and the hardware he put in it can't handle that so asked me to help him pick parts for upgrading. Currently, the new streaming box he built has an i5-8500, 8GB of RAM, and GTX 550Ti which can easily stream 1080p60 @ 5500 Kb/s and record locally using the stream renderer. His secondary streaming rig is an older thinkserver with a measly i3-4130 that can only do 720p30 @ 5500 Kb/s and locally recording using the stream renderer so he wants to just use his new machine with 2 instances of OBS and get rid of his secondary rig. So what kind of hardware would he need to upgrade too? He has to be able to run 2 instances of OBS with BOTH streaming at 1080p60 @ 5500Kb/s using the fast CPU preset (medium if possible) and BOTH recoding locally at 1080p60 @ 15-20 Mb/s using either NVENC or the AMD equivalent. I'm thinking he would need an i7-8700, but I'm not sure what GPU would be able to handle 2 1080p60 encodings. I know only 600 series and up support NVENC and it had to be a GTX series on the Nvidia side, I'm not too familiar with AMD options. He's ok with buying a used GPU on eBay to keep cost down it just had to handle the work, also because of the 3u case he's using the Logic Case SC-34390 the GPU cooler cant be taller than a full height PCIe slot and the power connector has to be on the back of the card. I saw some evga 650's and 650 ti's on eBay for under $100 which fit in the case, would those be powerful enough? If not what about a GTX 750ti or GTX 1050/1050ti since those don't require external power and have lots of variants that will fit in the case or whatever AMD card would work. I'm actually pretty sure a 1050 could handle it fine with no issue, I saw in Blunty's video that when he was using a 1050ti to encode a 1080p60 recoding it was well under 50% usage.

MandoPanda · November 8, 2018

PSA:

But really though, why does he need to stream two instances at once. You have to also think about what the computer is doing with those two things you want to do... So, I don't know, something with a lot of cores. Threadripper.

What's your budget anyway?