Question / Help Trying to understand the factors involved in why my new laptop performs so much better than my old one, despite upgrades.

[Honkmaster]

I use OBS to livestream a weekly open mic to Facebook. I also save a local copy for uploading clips to YouTube. I'm trying to understand what factors are contributing to the fact that 80% of frames get dropped when I use my old laptop vs only 10% with my new one. I'd like to, if possible, make my old one good enough to use for streaming.

I used to use a Logitech C920 but upgraded to a Logitech BRIO for a much clearer picture. I still use the C920 as a 2nd cam to film and display the drummer in the corner of the video (when there is one) so I don't have to zoom way out.
Example: https://i.imgur.com/WQha6tV.jpg

I upgraded the old laptop with an SSD and slightly more ram but it clearly wasn't enough.

Old Laptop: Toshiba Satellite C55-B (w/upgrades). 4GB RAM, i3 CPU 1.70GHz
New: Lenovo Ideapad 320S. 8GB RAM, i7 CPU 2.90GHz

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LOGS

The last two streams I did on my old laptop:

2019-04-11 18-51-47
"number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 213655/249706 (85.6%)"

2019-04-18 18-47-24
"number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 192206/248005 (77.5%)"


Now, the last stream using my new laptop:

2019-04-25 18-16-57
"number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 32741/301239 (10.9%)"

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Which are the greatest factors in play? How important is CPU clock speed? Which software settings could I change to improve framerate when using my old laptop? Which hardware updates could I do it improve it?

Thank you.

 

[R1CH]

The CPU is much better in the newer laptop, if you're using the x264 encoder this is quite CPU intensive and likely the bottleneck. Lowering resolution or FPS will help reduce CPU load, if your laptop supports it you could also try the Intel QSV encoder which encodes on the Intel GPU (albeit requiring more bitrate for the same quality).