Recommendation for YouTube Streaming

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phillipd

New Member
Hello,

As a computer scientist I should be able to workout what type of laptop I need for our church for YouTube broadcasting without any difficulty but I'm completely confused! Currently, I use a 2013 Macbook Air to broadcast our service via YouTube using OBS outputting at 720p 30fps with visuals via the webcam and sound via an external device. Obviously, this can't continue so we are looking for a new Windows laptop which needs to produce the same output (or better if possible) and I'll be using an external webcam that can do better than 720p. I've got as far as working out that a laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is probably the basic required though availability is interesting! I have found an HP Pavilion laptop with a AMD Ryzer 7 4800H chp and a 1660 Ti (but with Max-Q) plus 16GB of RAM for a good price.

So am I heading in the right direction? I notice cheaper laptops are available with the 1650 NVIDIA GeForce but wasn't sure if that was useful or not. We will probably be running powerpoint at the same time.

Any help greatly appreciated
Thanks
Phillip
 
FerretBomb

FerretBomb

Active Member
Generally any laptop with a discrete nVidia GPU (with NVENC support!) is going to be able to handle the encoding load.

The 1650 and 1650Ti have the older Pascal encoding core. This delivers around x264 Fast quality.
The 1650 Super (only!) and the 1660 (all models) has the updated Turing NVENC core, which is on par with x264 Slow.
20-series and 30-series are all Pascal or Ampere, which deliver the same x264 Slow equivalent.

CPU, AMD Ryzen is fine, just don't bottom-barrel it.
Intel, an i5 or better is preferred, NOT A U-VARIANT. U models are ultra-low-power.
This is mostly important for handling overlays and camera decoding, but you still don't want to go with a cheap crappy APU or i3.

That Pavilion sounds like it should do the job for you. Make sure you have good USB support; since laptops can't be upgraded, it is VERY easy to overrun your inputs if you only have a single UHCI/XHCI bottlenecking everything, and a ton of camera inputs.
 
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