Budget streaming rig (non gaming) - Would a Xeon suffice?

[Pathfinder100]

My sister is setting up a business that will involve streaming workshops over Zoom. She asked me to do the legwork on the IT side. Originally she wanted a laptop, but has a very limited budget, maybe £500-600 max for everything.

As i understand it, the PC needs to be relatively powerful, so any laptop in the budget range will be insufficient. She will be running probably two cameras, maybe three. She is looking at a mix of cameras, probably one that suits video conferencing and one that will do close ups on a workbench, with the intention of swapping between them while streaming. Audio will be wireless headset.

Would a refurbished Xeon Workstation suffice? Say a dual quad x5670 (2x 6C @ 2.93GHz), 16GB Ram, 500GB SSD, Win 10 Pro. Would the system need a decent GPU, such as a GTX 970, or would it need better than that, maybe an RTX?

This setup would be a basic starter package until she has more money for upgrades.

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[Tomasz Góral]

I this case i think about video mixer, you can buy low cost 4 hdmi input for 300 euro, this device can send directly stream to popular service or connect to laptops or pc. Because after buy mixer you need work on computer with only one signal (from mixer), buy used i5 with GTX1050.

 

[Pathfinder100]

The problem with spending that much money on an hdmi input device is it leaves me only 300 euros to buy a computer, 2 decent cameras, a wireless headset and any other things I need to get it to work.

I guess I could work around it by getting say a Avermedia HD PCIe Capture card instead, for about £100, that would leave me the budget for the computer and other stuff. It limits the input to two webcams, but that's workable initially.

But the £600 budget is the absolute maximum she can afford. Ideally she doesn't want to spend more than £500. So that's about 600 euros max for everything, if we are doing euros. Buying i5's and modern graphics cards isn't really in budget. I could probably just about afford a 1030 at a push, but a 1050 is out of the question at current prices.

 

[Tomasz Góral]

Don’t buy 1030. Minimum is 1050 (nvenc hardware encoder), used device you can buy for 250-300 euro.
USB Webcam no need grabber, hdmi device is’t cheap and need grabber (additional cost).

 

[konsolenritter]

The problem with spending that much money on an hdmi input device is it leaves me only 300 euros to buy a computer, 2 decent cameras, a wireless headset and any other things I need to get it to work.

Thats a generic problem. Your sister is about to setup a (fresh, new?) business. Budget is low in reference to high demanding expectations like two or three cams from start-on, a headset, a used computer and "any other things" as you wrote.

This is a very frustrating way to start, to be honest. Because all things will be to cheapThere are two possibilities in general:

1. Look for "venture capitalist" in your family or friends and start with a good budget;
2. Start with very little expectations, to keep the frustration level low afterwards.

Point 2 would contain things like "better one good cam than three cheap crucial..." The thing is: If you are willing to start with very few, but good quality things, you may add/adjoin further stuff later (if money comes in) without dropping your start configuration. It could be a careful rising system, with quality in mind. Buy the second camera when the money is there. Or start with one low-budget webcam as the first one (if the workshop thing is the important one, those cam should be the better one). Later you may exchange the webcam by a second good one.
If you start the frustrating way instead (all things from start on, but cheap), you will find yourself (months later) with a lot experience of what-not-to-do-and-buy and a lot of lost money, cause you will buy all parts of the system twice.

And a personal hint: Especially wireless headsets are errorprone and frustrating to beginners due to their nature. The hints Tomasz gave are a very good starting point.

 

[koala]

About the graphics card: don't buy a gtx 1030, because it doesn't have nvenc and is just barely more powerful than an integrated GPU. Also don't buy any gtx 9xx, 7xx, 6xx, because these are in the process of being deprecated with no driver updates any more (gtx 9xx) or are already without current driver support (older than gtx 9xx). Also don't buy a AMD card if you aim at a budget CPU, because these don't have a hardware encoder good enough for quality streaming. If you want to sell your streaming, you need a minimum amount of quality, which can only achieved with either nvenc (Nvidia GPU) or x264 (software encoder, needs powerful enough CPU).

 

[Pathfinder100]

I'm starting to work out a way around this problem. Going through my old stored kit and finding workarounds.

I have an old (forgotten about) i7-7700k, Asus Maximus board and 16GB Ram, in a box that is unused from an old project, so that's the base computer done for nothing. I wasn't going to buy any GTX 970's, I already have a couple of old ones in my cupboard. So if one of those will work initally, I was planning on using one, maybe the MSI. If not I have a couple of old quadro's which i've checked do support NVENC. So that would be the basic bit done.

The alternative was to buy a massive multi core Xeon, say a dual hexacore with X5670's, so 12 cores (plus an additional 12 HT), would that have been enough to do the x264 in software? As I remember from encoding videos in the past, Xeons always came out on top when doing encoding/parallel processing.

I did consider a 2U rackmount server I have on my wardrobe, but it's only a dual quad and its old tech circa 2009, more useful for webserver and gaming server usage (and optimised for that type of thing), and really loud when running.

The audio is going to be a problem I guess. She needs to be able to move around while streaming because the workshop is quite large. So maybe a camcorder on tripod might be a better bet for the closeups since it can be moved and have cheaper for the actual facetime end of it and by cheap I mean maybe a microsoft lifecam studio or logitech 920 (not amazon bargain bin).

Ideally i would like to avoid hdmi for now, the cost involved in initial setup is beyond the scope of this project for now. She understands this isn't going to be perfect initially. She will only be using it one day a week due to having a full time job already. Then when she gets the business up and running, maybe 1-2 days a week. Once it's generating profit then more will get spent on upgrading the kit.

I warned her this will be a steep learning curve. She isn't as tech savvy as I am and struggles with some computer stuff. But c'est la vie.

I'm sure she'll be making an account on here at some point. I will also point her at the tutorials i've read about.

 

[koala]

Don't buy obsolete hardware or server hardware. It requires a huge amount of space, is very loud, and it consumes/wastes so much electric power in a year that can better be invested in buying new, more powerful hardware. A Xeon X5670 is 11 years old and has only 2/3 of the computing power of my already 5 year old I7-6700K. Every cent spent for such a monster is wasted.

Don't underestimate the noise generated by such devices. You want to live stream with professional ambitions? You need a silent environment for this, and I mean really silent - humming noise isn't silent.

 

[Tomasz Góral]

My i7-9750h is 70% faster like my old i7-6700.
Buy always best hardware as you can. Important in video is optic (lens), second is camera, because is very expensive. I7-7700 is good for start.