When planning for House of Worship livestream, I get limited budget
But before targeting bottom end, consider what all you want the PC to handle
For example, are you thinking/planning/considering either showing a Service Bulletin or lower-thirds for lyrics/similar?
Do you have in-person worship now, or all remote? if remote, are you planning to have folks pre-record content (music, readings, etc)... obviously depends on style of worship. In our case, to promote sense of community, we rotate readers (just like was done for in-person). The recordings come from all sorts of devices, in varying resolutions, frame and bitrates, etc. an i5-6500HQ with a USB webcam chocked on our setup (I'm sure with what I know know, I could probably get it to work, at the expense of time to learn to master OBS low resource optimizations... a slightly more powerful PC and I can focus instead on content presentation, audio optimization for streaming (slightly different than in-house mix), etc
And this PC should last for years. Now that we have started livestreaming, the expectation is that we will continue, even once we do resume in-person services (presumably later this year). It is way cheaper to buy once and get something that will last, than buy cheap and have to replace it prematurely... but I get budget considerations. We specifically put together a tech needs list, presented a realistic plan, and solicited donations (and we got more than we asked for)
So, I completely concur with
@FerretBomb in terms of specs.
With that said, I personally avoid consumer grade PCs for reliability reasons, and I run my PCs connected to auto-voltage regulating UPSs. My primary PC just fried something yesterday (I'm sad) but that PC was over 10 yrs old and running great (for multiple Win10 VMs simultaneously, email, etc 24GB RAM and mutiple SSDs)... though too slow for photo & video video editing.. The PC I just bought for church livestreaming I expect to last at least 5 years, and should be able to handle streaming in 4K if/when the time comes. And once you record these services, are you going to want to edit sections from them and post to websites, or use for other activity (annual meeting, remembrance, etc).. If yes, do you have a PC powerful enough to edit video? I bought an 8core/16-thread system. I'd recommend at least a 6c/12t CPU and the GTX 1650 Super (Turing) or higher as noted above. Intel has screwed up too much over last 5 years for me to trust them, but either a 10th gen i7 or AMD Ryzen 3600X or higher should be fine. Such systems can be had for reasonable amounts (not that much extra over super cheap systems, and it will last at least 2X as long, if properly cared for)
- and consider your audio interface into OBS PC. Will you have a single analog signal? or does your mixer have a digital out option? is that a combined all-channel output, or will you have access to each channel digitally (which can be helpful, though extra work for livestream operator)? If you will run a DAW on OBS, and use audio compression, noise filtering, etc, then you'll need CPU power for that
- then you have to consider your longer-term video plans? what camera setup/connection? ie - where will video decode/uncompress from camera take place? We just got a NDI PTZ camera, which has its own implications vs SDI, USB, HDMI and capture card, etc
just things to consider
