Hardware Upgrade - CPU or Graphics card?

[Martin_H]

I have a low budget setup for OBS running on a Dell OptiPlex 7010 SFF 3rd Gen Quad Core i5-3470 8GB. Whilst that is at the lower end of the hardware spec for OBS, it works pretty well most of the time when streaming; I do run into significant lag problems if I record streams and the CPU usage tends to be very high overall, typically 70-90%+ which means I can’t run other applications.

I’m not too bothered about the recording limitations or running other software as this PC is dedicated to streaming. I’m uncomfortable, however, with the high CPU usage. I see two low budget options available to me:

• Upgrade the CPU to a i5-3570
  
  
• Install a AMD Radeon HD7570 graphics card (1 Gb)

Will either of those give me a significant improvement?

 

[deFrisselle]

GPU and encode on that to off load from the CPU
An SSD would help also Just the speed over a spinning disk will help with load and save times thus recording

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

The CPU change you from i5-3470 to i5-3570 is way too small to be meaningful - no not significant AT all.
Another more impactful CPU upgrade ... maybe... but not that.. if your MB supports it, maybe something like intel i7-3770
https://www.dell.com/community/Optiplex-Desktops/7010-Desktop-CPU-Upgrade-possible/td-p/5867985

Not my area, but AMD GPU encoding offload is panned... badly.. see EposVox YT videos... general consensus is to get a GTX 1650 Super (Turing based NVENC) or better. But not cheap at the moment. So when looking at a GPU, look at what it supports for encoding offload

 

[deFrisselle]

One problem he has is that he needs a half height GPU card due to the slim case

Basically, he has an old office thinclient

Half Height 1650 is $500 where the HD7570 (1st Gen VCE) is $50
For half the price he could get an RX 550/560 (3rd Gen VCE) for around $250-260
The StreamFX plugin will help with encoding on AMD Cards

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www.amazon.com

Also we're talking about a $160 PC

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Optiplex-7010-SFF-Desktop/dp/B01HSDJFFM

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

oh, yea .. overlooked SFF and the resulting low PSU power and in the 7010's case lack of AUX power connection for GPU (with 1650Super being a 100W card, and PCIe bus being max 75W). Further, Dell's specs indicate only a 50W PCIe low profile card supported, though others commented that low profile 1050Ti's at 75W worked fine (a 7010SFF GPU thread also at dell.com/community with pictures).
Totally agree that better investment would be a newer PC... and as much as I really wanted a SFF system, I ended up with a 7080 Tower specifically due to GPU requirements for live stream... oh well

I recall hearing about StreamFX and AMD GPU encoding ... is that out of beta/stable/effective?

 

[Martin_H]

Totally agree that better investment would be a newer PC...

That's always going to be the best answer from a performance perspective but not always a necessary step, it's often a case of "horses for courses". For example, when we first set this up, one of the people helping me is a professional musician and he was shit hot on the quality of audio and wanting to do more and more to get relatively minor improvements on it until I pointed out that as it is streaming of religious content, not a professional performance,and people using it are only interested in the content and are happy so long as they can hear and understand it; also, most of them will be watching and listening on phones and tablets which are not exactly going to reflect high-quality audio

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Couldn't agree more
The problem is that you are dealing with an OLD CPU trying to do heavy lifting (real-time video encoding)... so the horse is totally wrong for the course in this case
With some true tech wizards on both the OS and OBS, might you get a limited stream going... maybe/probably... but woudl you be ok with the required compromises? [and no I can't tell you what those would be... it depends]

The issue is that with a different power supply, you might be able to spend way more than the PC is worth to get a better GPU that could offload from the under-powered CPU. My question was whether recent StreamFX release might help in terms of using AMD GPUs for encoding. But even then, that CPU is still WAY to old and under-powered

For reference, I tried to stream our churches service with an Intel i5-6300HQ (2.3GHz 4c/4t circa Fall 2015), 8GB RAM, SATA SSD Win 10 Home edition, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M [brand new, clean and optimized OS install] and failed as the PC wasn't up to the task just alternating between a single USB webcam and simple pre-recorded videos, alongside a PPTx slide show window capture, streaming at 720p 30fps with no OBS effects/filters). I’ve learned a lot more about OBS since then, and I might be able to just squeak it out, but wasn’t worth it.

 

[Martin_H]

Couldn't agree more
The problem is that you are dealing with an OLD CPU trying to do heavy lifting (real-time video encoding)... so the horse is totally wrong for the course in this case.

I disagree - the horse has been perfectly adequate for the task which is to complete the course, not win the race. As I said in my OP, it had all been working fine except for recoding; I shouldn't even have mentioned that as we don't use recording - the only time I have used it was for my own troubleshooting and testing and I can easily get around that. Although it has been adequate, the CPU is now starting to show a bit of strain due to the introduction of a second camera and all I am looking for is a cheap way to ease that strain a little bit.

Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with any of the advice and opinions stated here about the value of hardware upgrades; there is some very good advice in it which I appreciate. As a part-time lecturer, I have already done quite a bit of upgrading on my home PC to improve online delivery of lectures and will likely do some more, so that advice will be useful to me in that context. In regard to the church streaming, however, all that is wanted is a cheap solution that will enable people to watch services streamed online.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Recording - ah... do you have a HDD, or SSD?
if HDD, then Hardware Resource monitoring would likely show that to be your bottleneck. All disks have throughput limits, and HDD are MUCH lower than SSDs, especially if a single drive with OS and App competing for Disk I/O so going from sequential write to random read/write
And a high CPU utilization won't help. And if memory constrained, then default Windows swapping will create extra disk I/O

 

[Martin_H]

HDD but as I said, I'm not worried about recording, I don't need it. I only mentioned it in passing. 8 GB of RAM and PC is dedicated to OBS so shouldn't be any swapping going on.