Like most things ... depends on your budget and expected lifecycle for this PC (stream for 1 year, expect to support streaming at 4K in 203 years, etc??)... all lead to different answers
The basic recommendation when trying to be cost-effective, is not not over-spend on parts, but is to last expected lifetime, with some headroom to not stumble on unexpected glitches
- So at the low-end would be a Turing NVENC based system (GTX 1650 Super or better)
- I expect years of life for my equipment (properly maintained, Pure Sine wave power) so I wouldn't go anything less than 8c/16t today. Intel is stumbling terribly in their manufacturing process, meaning basic architectural security issues not being resolved at design level. And still don't have PCIe 4 desktop systems out (maybe in a few months, but real CPU to compete with AMD isn't Rocket Lake, but next gen due almost 12 months from now. On the other hand, current AMD Ryzen 5xxx desktop CPU hard to come by
One consideration is just how many NDI signals you need to support (and is that HX that requires decompressing)?
Hw many capture cards (gets to how many PCIe lanes you'll need)
Personally, I avoid consumer PCs due to use of lower-end quality parts. I go for business class systems, with next business day onsite service (you may want 7 days/week instead)...
For $1,500 delivered, I got a business class i7-10700K, GTX 1660 Super, 16GB RAM and a 1TB HDD (which I use for archiving, added NVMe SSD for OS, recording target, etc), with 5 year NBD support... and it rarely gets above 10% CPU... but I also expect to do some video editing on this machine and for it to handle whatever streaming in the full 5 years... so I'm ok with a little excess now
As event tech, I'd assume a smaller form factor would be preferred. The constraint I found was finding a SFF system, with power and space for desired GPU (more than PCie 75w power). Such system exist but only from boutique builders.... For me and my use case, I gave up the smaller form factor to get the other things I wanted.
If you want the system to last for a while, I'd think portable system (like 1/2 or 1/3 rack ?) with rack mount pure sine wave UPS, and a fully managed (ideally router capable) PoE managed Ethernet switch (support for PCs and NDI PTZ cameras), that can handle more than 1000T (802.11bz or if budget allows, a 10gb switch)
The joy of being an IT Infrastructure Architect with time to burn over the holidays... ;^) For me this is fun stuff
