Upgrading for Game Recording/Editting, help?

[Dremorack]

Hello! Just come into a bit of money and always wanted to try my hand at recording games for youtube etc.. I've built one PC before and its still going strong but think I need an upgrade to achieve what I want.

This is the list I've picked: http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/RyNhHx

And this is an image of what I currently have (I have replaced the GPU with a GTX 970): http://i58.tinypic.com/1io468.png

Being a novice at this sort of thing, can you advise whether firstly it'll be a noticable upgrade and secondly whether the new PC would be capable of recording PC games and rendering them?

Thank you for your time

[Deleted]

If you don't do much video editing i think your i5 should be enough and you should overclock it if you haven't already. What resolution you play atm? Cause if its 1080p@60hz that 980ti aint worth the money over the 970 which can cap most games out there already. In other words i don't think its worth to upgrade just buy a good 240/256gb ssd.

[godgunner]

in most games you wont see a huge difference simply because only a few games really push the latest GPUs unless your going for higher resolutions.
But in rendering and you will see a nice bump up with the new cpu and gpu.
some notes though. You should get a SSD and install your operating system on it. Once you have it you will never go back to regular HDDs.
You should also look for a more reliable power supply the CX model from corsair is entry level and is not a good choice.

[Dremorack]

If you don't do much video editing i think your i5 should be enough and you should overclock it if you haven't already. What resolution you play atm? Cause if its 1080p@60hz that 980ti aint worth the money over the 970 which can cap most games out there already. In other words i don't think its worth to upgrade just buy a good 240/256gb ssd.

With current tests I've done, my pc seems to struggle to record alot of games without dropping far too many frames.. Is that CPU, GPU, RAM? I will probably go with the upgraded processor as I will be editing etc, and maybe keep my current card to see how that goes.

Forgot to mention @godgunner I have windows on an SSD already I will look into a more reliable power source, suggestions?

Thanks

[godgunner]

EVGA SuperNOVA
Seasonic
silverstone

just find some of the mid tier ones with good reviews.
might cost a little more then the corsair cx one but its about reliability. annoying to redo all your cable management because of a bricked power supply.

[MrPaladinGuy]

If you're going to save the video in a raw format, then you need to research sequential read and write speeds for your target storage drive as this is the biggest reason for slowdowns that most people aren't aware of. However, this only applies to mechanical drives, and single mechanical drives at that.

I'll help you out and say around 100MB/s is what you need for 1080p @ 60fps. You should also be saving the files to a drive that isn't being used by your OS, as in not your OS drive or where you have the game installed to (or anything else running from that drive for that matter)

Now, I haven't paid much attention to SR/SW speeds in the last 2 years since I quit caring about recording, but IIRC unless you're willing to spend hundreds, 130MB/s is basically the best you'll get from non-raided mechanical drives. For reference, SSD's a few years ago gave a SR/SW speeds of around 390-550

You could of course get an SSD meant solely for this as prices are now very low all the time, just do the math on how long your SSD will last (since writing to it lowers it's lifespan) and in this case you're writing a gigantic amount of data to it, quite often.

Your GTX 970 supports 1440p @ 60fps via Shadowplay and you won't take a performance hit due to capturing using GPU cycles and the encoding being done via a chip on the GPU and there's no huge raw file to store.

Pros to this are

It now uses a high quality x264 codec, which is typically what you'd want to use for HD if you were encoding raw video using VirtualDub + a x264vfw codec with the VirtualDub hack enabled to encode video.

You basically lose no performance other than possible initial occurrence of stutter once you enable recording, but it should only last a second.

Cons to this are

The Geforce Experience (required for Shadowplay) may cause microstutter, I've had it occur in fullscreen and in windowed-fullscreen games.

Since the file's already encoded this poses a problem if you want to do any type of editing as even if you have software that supports this and want to do something as simple as trimming the video, it will drastically lower the quality once you transcode.

[Dremorack]

Thanks for all the advice so far. My take away is potentially I still want the new processor (which means a new mobo? since the new one needs a different slot right?)

Keep the graphics card, Up the ram, get a new hard drive, get a better PSU

About right? Seems like im pretty much gutting the thing as is! But would save on case/fans/cd drives etc I suppose

[Lathais]

Thanks for all the advice so far. My take away is potentially I still want the new processor (which means a new mobo? since the new one needs a different slot right?)

Keep the graphics card, Up the ram, get a new hard drive, get a better PSU

About right? Seems like im pretty much gutting the thing as is! But would save on case/fans/cd drives etc I suppose

There is really no need to upgrade that CPU. You'll only see about a 10% increase in performance, if that. Just OC it if you have not already.

[Dremorack]

There is really no need to upgrade that CPU. You'll only see about a 10% increase in performance, if that. Just OC it if you have not already.

I OC it to 3.8ghz but it gets warm.. im lead to believe about 60 is safe? thats where it sits now under stress and idles about 35-40.. with a better cooler perhaps I can increase the oc?

[Nellah]

I OC it to 3.8ghz but it gets warm.. im lead to believe about 60 is safe? thats where it sits now under stress and idles about 35-40.. with a better cooler perhaps I can increase the oc?

60 is just fine, Tjmax of an Ivy Bridge chip is 105C and though I don't recommend running anywhere NEAR that you have at least 10-15C headroom before stability probably becomes an issue.

However (and I seem to recommend this a LOT) you could use OBS with QuickSync enabled for streaming / recording. I do so at 2560x1600 on a 4670K with pretty much zero performance hit. NVIDIA ShadowPlay is another quite good option, or getting an SSD for raw recording (as FRAPS used to do and I think still does). If you go the SSD route, and I'd recommend getting one anyway, don't stress about the lifespan as consumer SSDs can write way way way past their rated lifespan (some up to 10 times that much) and since you'd be writing complete sectors instead of lots of little tiny files there will be very little write amplification.

[SoulForge]

With current tests I've done, my pc seems to struggle to record alot of games without dropping far too many frames.. Is that CPU, GPU, RAM? I will probably go with the upgraded processor as I will be editing etc, and maybe keep my current card to see how that goes.

Forgot to mention @godgunner I have windows on an SSD already I will look into a more reliable power source, suggestions?

Thanks

This isn't uncommon if you run the recording and play the game on the same system. You will take a performance hit. Its the one reason I bought a capture card and will be using a secondary system for all my capturing off my main system.

[Lathais]

I OC it to 3.8ghz but it gets warm.. im lead to believe about 60 is safe? thats where it sits now under stress and idles about 35-40.. with a better cooler perhaps I can increase the oc?

Is that 60 under stress test or under normal load? Either way, that's quite cool. Max temps is 105 on that, you can run at 90 and be ok really, though probably starting to shorten your chips life. I think it's pretty ok to hit 75-80 during stress testing though.

[Gaebryel Quintyne]

If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly suggest checking out Mirillis Action. I used it in the past and used it recently (sporadically but due to my own reasons and not because of the software), and it works wonders. No fps lag whatsoever. It could all depend on the user's computer though but it should work fine. You should try it if you got the money to spend . I know the quality of videos is superb when you play it on a media player but YouTube always processes videos into crap if there is movement on screen, even if it 1080p60.
Here's a link to the recording software just in case:
https://mirillis.com/en/products/action.html

[SoulForge]

If you haven't checked it out yet, I highly suggest checking out Mirillis Action. I used it in the past and used it recently (sporadically but due to my own reasons and not because of the software), and it works wonders. No fps lag whatsoever. It could all depend on the user's computer though but it should work fine. You should try it if you got the money to spend . I know the quality of videos is superb when you play it on a media player but YouTube always processes videos into crap if there is movement on screen, even if it 1080p60.
Here's a link to the recording software just in case:
https://mirillis.com/en/products/action.html

You will always take an FPS hit. You may not notice it depending on the game and how high the frame rate it is but its impossible NOT to take a hit when you do both on the same system. That is why I mentioned the capture card earlier.