Question New Build - Gaming - Streaming - grandson

[mike8675309]

What YOUR PC will be used for. That means what types of tasks you'll be performing.
Building a new machine used for Gaming, and streaming of that gaming for my grandson. A Christmas gift for him.
Games played example:
Mindcraft
Fortnight
Roblox
Call of Duty Warzone


2. What YOUR budget is. A price range is acceptable as long as it's not more than a 20% spread
Lowest possible price to achieve above, but be upgradeable. Grandson is 8, wants to get into streaming. Can start basic, but so he can upgrade over time.

3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from
USA - Minnesota, access to Microcenter.

5. IF YOU have a brand preference. That means, are you an Intel-Fanboy, AMD-Fanboy, ATI-Fanboy, nVidia-Fanboy, Seagate-Fanboy, WD-Fanboy, etc.
No preference.

6. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are.
One 250MB SSD was salvaged from his dad's 8 year ago build.

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.
Default speeds at first. He's young, so overclocking in the future.

8. What resolution, not monitor size, will you be using?
2k 1440 monitor. No 4k to start out.

9. WHEN do you plan to build it?
Late November, early December.

10. Do you need to purchase any software to go with the system, such as Windows or Blu Ray playback software?
Will need Windows.

In July I built a work from home system documented here.

Solved! - Working from Home, Time to settle in

Working at home for at least another 6 months most of the time and want to be more comfortable. I spend much of my time in Word, Excel, and then Visual Studio, VS Code, and then all over the cloud. GCP, GCS, Github, Cloud stuff. Then we have our virtual meetings. Have a work laptop but it...

forums.anandtech.com

 

[MalVeauX]

Hi Mike,

A solid budget will be needed to keep it realistic. Those games are not hard to run at 1080p or 1440p with yesteryear hardware, but making a streaming machine is rather different because the same PC will have to split resources to both render the game and also capture the output as a live stream of video and audio and generate an encoded full content video stream that is then live recorded/uploaded to a service. And a big part of game streaming is commentary so a headset or good microphone setup is used, and often times there's a video-in-video stream of the player to showcase personality. Forgive me if this is obvious, just pointing out that a streaming setup is not the same as a basic gaming machine. There's a lot more that goes into the streaming side for content creation than the hardware for gaming.

It can be done with one machine, but requires more hardware. The ideal is to have a gaming machine and a stream/rendering machine (two dedicated machines). The streaming one can be rather low end, as it just needs to real time encode a video stream, which is not too difficult. While one machine can do this, if it's competitive online gaming, it would be frustrating to have any hiccups or slow downs due to any of that while playing the game. Just something to think about.

Basically a gaming machine is built, whatever will handle the games, and you can add a capture card to capture the streamed output. Free software can be used, but the rendering software can really require some CPU/GPU to render (like OBS, which is free). So this can tax hardware while playing a game. But it may be doable on these games as they're not as resource heavy.

So up front, I would look at:

nVidia RTX 2060 (GPU)
alt. nVidia 1660 Super (GPU) (budget)

Ryzen 5 3600XT (CPU)

16Gb DDR4 3200~3600 Memory (RAM)

1TB NVMe M2 SSD

AM4 570x Chipset Motherboard (such as an Asus TUF)

Capture Cards (for streaming):
AverMedia Live Gamer HD 2
alt Elgato HD60 S

Anyhow that should at least get the conversation started.

I realize this is an 8 year old, but if you want to have a good skeleton to build from over time, you'll want to really get into what it takes to develop the streaming side as it's a lot more complicated from software side and internet side of things with the content creation (cameras, microphones, lighting, etc) more so than just a gaming PC (which can be done on really low end hardware).

Personally I would build a streaming PC with low end hardware so its dedicated (budget $300 USD). And then build a gaming PC for the games, something $400~600 or depending on budget. Overall budget around $1200 for a decent entry setup to streaming with entry hardware. But this way the gaming machine can be upgraded over time and swapped around or even a console introduced, while the streaming PC won't need much change overtime for basic 1080p content.

Lastly, don't reuse that 8 year old SSD for anything important, it's near it's end of life most likely and is not going to be a high performance drive anyways being that old probably.

Very best,

 

[mike8675309]

I hadn't thought about having two machines, and that is something for me to do a little more research to understand how it would all work. I could see that making some things much easier for someone just starting out.

Thanks.

 

[mike8675309]

Here is one approach I found that eliminates the capture card.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

Yea, two PC is a great way to go, but it also means two motherboards, two PSUs, two CPUs, etc. The streaming PC really doesn't need much GPU. You could build an APU unit to handle it really for cheap and provide both CPU horsepower and GPU horsepower if its more efficient. That's something to look into, as the 264/265 codex are often hardware supported and so they work really fast on modern CPU and modern GPU with little effort, so you can use lower end hardware and save money there. Granted, a second PC costs more in general than a capture card does. So it's a balance between how much performance hit you're willing to take on the gaming PC to then also collect the stream output and encode it and then upload somewhere. To do it all on one PC requires beefier hardware, so increases cost, but makes it all inclusive. So again, there's compromise somewhere. Increase cost to have it all in one PC or spread it out over two PCs with lower end hardware. Either way, game streaming or content streaming in general requires some hidden costs as its not as simple as just streaming your screen as it used to be. These days content creation involves overlay video of the player, audio from their microphone, etc, which takes some more software and hardware (additional camera, microphone, etc) and of course putting that all together does cost resources. OBS is free and fairly easy to use, but it does consume resources. The machine will need lots of RAM. 16Gb can saturate quickly if one machine is doing everything plus the gaming; so best to target more on one machine, or spread it out over two. Two PC's can also mean two screens, two sets of peripherals, etc. The cost goes up a lot with two machines, but you get greater control and it's less intensive on the single machine which can matter a lot when competitive gaming.

I would wire them via gigabit on a router and avoid any wireless wifi connections between the two PC's; even though that's possible with Wifi NICs and 5Ghz band, but any hiccup is going to cost a lot of frames and get choppy or drop, not worth it mid-game.

Or again, just build a beefy single machine and include a capture card and run the game at lower quality settings to free up resources. In general gaming at 1080p will be easy. It's getting into 2k or 4k where things get significantly harder to run at high quality, but modern cards can run all of today's games at 1080p max quality and not break a sweat, so that makes it easier to then collect/stream and encode. As you saw, most people are not uploading/encoding full resolution 4k stuff, it's mostly being downsampled to 720p or 1080p at best anyways.

Very best,

 

[VirtualLarry]

Don't forget that if you want to stream PC games, to say, Twitch, modern NVidia as well as AMD GPUs have features built-in to do such things. Encoding on the GPUs, and driver support / control panels to do all of this.
Really, unless you're going really high-end, or plan to stream console games too, then there's no need for a separate capture card. honestly, using the GPUs themselves, your internet connection bandwidth may matter more than getting a separate PC or capture card.

Edit: I would invest in a decent-quality mic and webcam though, maybe even 4K.

 

[mike8675309]

Likely going to go with a single system, leverage an Nvida GPU leveraging its NVENC encoder.
Looking to get final prices I'm finding many things not in stock.
Microcenter has zero Ryzen 5 3600XT CPU's.
This could be a challenge to build.
Here is the PC Part Picker list we are working with. Any other suggestions welcome.

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/mike8675309/saved/D6X8rH

 

[Steltek]

Likely going to go with a single system, leverage an Nvida GPU leveraging its NVENC encoder.
Looking to get final prices I'm finding many things not in stock.
Microcenter has zero Ryzen 5 3600XT CPU's.
This could be a challenge to build.
Here is the PC Part Picker list we are working with. Any other suggestions welcome.

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/mike8675309/saved/D6X8rH

3600XT availability is not surprising, since AMD is currently trying shift as much production over as they can to ramp up production of the 5000 series chips. If you buy the 3600XT from a different source, it will cost you ~$250 (about $30 more) at Newegg/Walmart/Amazon (same 3rd party seller, ANTonline).

Does your local Microcenter have any decent R7 3700X bundles available? You might make up some of the price difference with one. The 3700X is also a good processor (albeit one with 2 cores and 4 threads more than a 3600XT, which might help you on the streaming side at 1080p anyway).

 

[mike8675309]

Does your local Microcenter have any decent R7 3700X bundles available? You might make up some of the price difference with one. The 3700X is also a good processor (albeit one with 2 cores and 4 threads more than a 3600XT, which might help you on the streaming side at 1080p anyway).

They have the R7 3700X on sale now for $279.99
They have a number of bundles with the B450 mother boards for under $400. But if building for the future I want to look at others.
Also some B550 boards but in the mATX size under $400.

Ryzen 7 3700X + Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite WiFi $449.98
Ryzen 7 3700X + Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master w wifi $619.98
Ryzen 7 3700X + Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi for $529.98

 

[zangryth]

Game streaming is not like paying games on a video console= it's not plug and play.
In October, my 21 yr old daughter wanted to start a game streaming channel, but I wasn't sure she would like it.
I am Mr Cheapo.
I already had a HP 590 Inspiron mini desktop I bought ebay for $200 back in May. I used it.
Next, a good Logitech 1080 game streaming video camera at Walmart for $64 and a shorty EVGA GTX 1050ti, purchased locally off Facebook marketplace for $85. The PC had an i3-8100 and 8 gb ram. The power supply was 180 watts. So I had under $400 in a full streaming setup. The PS was all 12 volt outputs and by my power calculations, I would be at around 70% load.
Yes, it all worked pretty good. 122-126 watts at the outlet while steaming games using OBS and Twitch- 720 and 30fps. Fortnite had some occasional stutters, so she concentrated on simpler games like Among Us, which she loves.
In about 3 weeks she had met the requirements on Twitch to start making money. Now she is using a new Lenovo Legion PC from Costco we got on sale for $699 just before Thanksgiving. It has a i5-10400g , gtx 1660 super and 16 gb of ram, ssd and HD. There is no way I could build something this robust for that price and it works great.
My opinion- don't build anything from scratch for a child/teen just starting out.
If I was doing this again for an budding young game streamer, I would buy a used Dell Inspiron mini destop 3670 ( has a 290 watt PS) with an i3 or better and for a video card, buy a Nvidia GTX 1650 super. Use a sata to 6-pin PCI-e plug cable adapter for the extra 25 watts for that card.
I see used Dell 3670's on ebay with an i5-8400 for around $300- closer to $200 for an i3-8100.
Also, there are about 3 software programs to install and setup to be a game streamer. I can see maybe a motivated 11 yr old doing this-with some help. My daughter needed my help several times to get everything installed and configured. She was lucky her 70 yr old father was still building PCs- since 1995.
Ps- I forgot about Steam and all the other game portals- decisions, decisions.