Series of Questions on a Streaming Setup

[Sandraudiga]

Planning on building a new system in the next 2-3 months, with the aim to stream a few different games for fun. Been wanting to do it for awhile, but a combination of moving to a place with fibre internet, skylake and pascal means I've decided to go ahead and do it.

Never ran a multiple monitor set up before, and most of my questions are regarding this. I plan on gaming on one monitor, and having misc stuff on the second monitor.

I plan on buying a 1440p 144 hertz monitor for the main screen, not sure which one yet. Will I be able to use my old monitor as the second screen if it is a 1080p and 120 hertz? If they aren't compatible, would the old monitor be compatible with a second 1080p 144 hertz monitor? Could just get 2 of the better monitors, but can't decide until I know what will work together and what won't.

Was thinking of upgrading to either a PCIexpress SSD or an M.2 SSD for the OS and main games, but unsure which of those would be better, or if they would even benefit the streaming part at all. Either way I plan on getting one of the two, just because its a new system so why not. Is one of them better/more reliable than the other? Don't plan on running SLi, if that has any relevant to that question.

I did read an article a few months back suggesting that new motherboards coming out would have benefits while streaming, but I can't remember the context or find the article again. Might have been me misreading, or misunderstanding, but is motherboard choice going to have much of an effect at all? Currently thinking the ASUS Sabertooth z170, but given it is a few months away that will probably change.

RAM is another question I've been considering, in the past I've been quite happy with 8 gigs and didn't see much of an improvement going to 16 gigs so I set up a RAM Disk with the other 8. Are larger amounts of RAM going to help streaming? I am specifically thinking of going 32 gigs, but if going from 32 gigs to 64 gigs will positively affect streaming I will do that.

That's all the questions I can think of atm, I am sure I'll come up with more as things get more towards the actual part selections etc.

Thank you for your time

[Deleted]

Keep in mind that a 1440p and 144hz screen is quite expensive even more so if it also needs to be a IPS panel.

I'm not exactly sure on this but I think most streamers stream 720p meaby 1080p but the 1440p will not affect your viewers. I'm not entirely sure about it though since I don't stream myself. Also to take advantage of the 144Hz you will need a good GPU.

Different resolutions shouldn't matter. So the other screen can work as your second screen.

I think going over 32gb of ram is overkill.

The SSD is something I'm not sure of, I don't think it will differ that much(depends on the motherboard if I read this correctly.)

But there should be someone on here who knows more about computers

[Lathais]

Keep in mind that a 1440p and 144hz screen is quite expensive even more so if it also needs to be a IPS panel.

I'm not exactly sure on this but I think most streamers stream 720p meaby 1080p but the 1440p will not affect your viewers. I'm not entirely sure about it though since I don't stream myself. Also to take advantage of the 144Hz you will need a good GPU.

Different resolutions shouldn't matter. So the other screen can work as your second screen.

I think going over 32gb of ram is overkill.

The SSD is something I'm not sure of, I don't think it will differ that much(depends on the motherboard if I read this correctly.)

But there should be someone on here who knows more about computers

Due to bandwidth limitations, mainly on Twitch's end if you are not a partner, streamers tend to have to decide between 720p@60FPS or 1080p@30FPS. If you manage to get enough followers and become a twitch partner then it becomes possible to do 1080p@60FPS. I guess at that point it may be possible to stream 1440p@30FPS, but probably not worthwhile as I doubt many of the people who watch streams have a 1440p display, so it would be pretty pointless.

[Deleted]

Due to bandwidth limitations, mainly on Twitch's end if you are not a partner, streamers tend to have to decide between 720p@60FPS or 1080p@30FPS. If you manage to get enough followers and become a twitch partner then it becomes possible to do 1080p@60FPS. I guess at that point it may be possible to stream 1440p@30FPS, but probably not worthwhile as I doubt many of the people who watch streams have a 1440p display, so it would be pretty pointless.

Thanks for confirming it, I had heard a few things but now I know why.

Yeah, btw something I'm unclear of if he runs a 1440p display at 144hz and only gets 40FPS since his GPU can't really handle it well can he still convert it to 720p and 60FPS?

[Djriff]

Honestly one thing I would do is build your new PC with gaming in mind and keep your current PC on standby. You can use a capture card (Elgato HD60 is a good one IMO) and stream via your old PC. I know quite a few top streamers do something like this. This has a handful of problems though. You'll need to get a program like Synergy if you only want to use 1 mouse/KB setup. Alternatively if you have a KVM switch, that'll work as well. You'll need to run your sound through the other PC via an audio cable then listen to that on your other computer. You'll also have to have your mic go through that as well. Ideally you'll only be running games and nothing else on your gaming PC. Your streaming PC will be running OBS/Xsplit, your dashboard, voicecomms, music, etc. Using this type of setup means that your gaming PC won't be overtaxed and all the hard processing on your CPU will be done on your older PC. Another plus to using the Elgato HD60 is you can also stream console games via HDMI, which is nice if you wanted to branch out in the future. If not, then I'd look into an internal PCI-E capture card which may work better and be slightly cheaper.

I run a similar setup for my stream using my ASUS laptop to do all the stream processing. This also lets me record and stream at the same time without losing any performance in the game.

Yeah, btw something I'm unclear of if he runs a 1440p display at 144hz and only gets 40FPS since his GPU can't really handle it well can he still convert it to 720p and 60FPS?

Well your stream would output at 60fps and you'll get some weird frames on the streams end, but it's all relative to your in game FPS. In WoW I average 63 FPS in raids and it'll dip below that when a bunch of stuff happens at once. Watching some of my vods, I didn't really notice to big of a difference from what I experienced in the game vs what happened on my viewers end.

[Sandraudiga]

Thanks for all the responses. I'll be using either a 1080 or a 1080Ti depending on whether it is released by the time I buy the parts or not as well as a decently overlocked i7 6700k, so shouldn't be an issue to do the 720p at 60fps or 1080p at 30fps. So it seems 1080p 144hz monitors are the way to go, only doing it for fun so won't be aiming for any sort of partnership to stream at anything higher.