Question / Help Question about streaming with two PCs

[Smoshi]

I'm going to be working on a second PC next month and was wondering how a double PC setup works. I know the first PC does nothing but encoding (streaming) and the second PC you play the game without the extra lag from streaming.

How good does the streaming PC need to be?

 

[Boildown]

It has to be pretty strong if you want to get to the some of the better presets without duplicating frames, which is half the reason anyone does it. Generally an Intel i7 Sandy, Ivy, or Haswell is the best choice, an AMD 8350 or 8320 somewhat behind it. Anything less than that probably isn't worth the effort.

Though you could make an argument for using one of the cheaper Intel Haswells, relying on Quicksync to do all the encoding, since with Haswell the Quicksync quality is actually quite decent. (Cheapest applicable Haswell: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116945 .)

If you don't want to stream, just capture to disk, you can probably do that without a 2nd PC using Quicksync or NVENC, or just OBS on UltraFast with a really high bitrate.

 

[dodgepong]

The basic idea of a dual-PC setup is that you have a capture card in the second computer, and you are outputting your monitor signal out of 2 inputs on your GPU so that both your monitor and your capture card can read it. Then you add the capture card to OBS in the streaming computer, and it's pretty straightforward from there.

 

[Smoshi]

I see. Well, was planning on putting an i7 in the second system. So I would need a capture card to go along with it.
If I do plan on having a dual-pc setup, I will definitely be back here with loads of questions haha.

Thank you guys for the help.