Question / Help CPU upgrade or capture card on my laptop?

C

Cryonic

Member
Its just that simple. I have an old Phenom II X4 965BE @ 4GHz sitting in my rig and its enough for most games but not enough to keep the 720p 30FPS stream running smooth.
And i have an option to use my laptop with a capture card for streaming.
i5 3230M 2,6GHz (dualcore Ivy with hyperthreading) - will it work fine or do i really need to upgrade my rig now to get the performance i want? It will be used only for OBS & basic stuff + windows.
Right now the CPU load on my Phenom is about 25% max.
GPU is r9 270X OC 2GB and resolution is 1080p (3 monitor setup)

I will upgrade the CPU anyway, but it would be great to save the money now.
 
And i still dont know, is it worth it to get a capture card (USB) or should i save the money and get a faster Xeon or i7 CPU ?
And will the Ivy i5 3230m work fine with just windows 8 & OBS running for capture?...
 
I would recommend to go for the Xeon/i7. You will be very much at the limit of your laptop even though it does not have to play the game, but just encode the capture card footage. The phenom might also sooner or later become too slow for games and with a new CPU you should have some headroom left.
Apart of that, I only know one external Capture Card I can really recommend. The xcapture-1 which costs around 250$.
 
Yeah... i will upgrade my CPU anyway, just got the R9 270X and i`m saving money now.
I just dont know about capture cards, how much do they improve the performance with the hardware enconder. Most people say OBS dont support it or it looks horrible compared to OBS enconding. And a good capture card cost a lot of money.
I think i will just get a nice Xeon (200€+), motherboard & cpu-cooler. RAM should be fine, 8gb DDR3 1333 is enough.
 
Some capture cards include their own encoder, BUT this cannot be used with OBS, mainly because the companies do not offer free SDK's which would allow us to use them in OBS. And its true that the HW encoder of such capture cards is inferior to normal CPU encoding, quality wise.
So on a one PC setup, a capture card is no real help when it comes to performance questions. It can be used in a secondary PC to offload all work to this machine. But thats another story.

One thing the Xeon's are missing compared to an i7 (in most cases) is the integrated graphics chip. This can be used with OBS as a HW encoder, its called QuickSync (Video encoder). Its not as good as CPU encoding, but with a latest generation Intel Processor it is usable for streaming I would say. So you might wanna read up on this topic and check if you can get a cheap xeon with igpu or get an i7 instead.
http://jack0r.com/high/quicksync_x264.html
Hover over the images to see the quicksync quality compared to x264 (cpu encoding).
 
Yep.. I was waiting for AMD to see how well the 8-core stuff works with multithreading & OBS, but it seems to fall behind Intel so hard and 90% of all people use Intel i7 or Xeon for streaming and they dont have performance problems at all.
It will be the best and it shold give me enough power to forget about FPS drops. Right now i can stream some games, but specially with flash videos playing in the background its just painful - up to 30% CPU usage for chrome is not cool.
I stream DJ-Sets too, so my rig is more than enough just for streaming - but not if i use other programms or games at the same time.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top