Gadgetory

whether you like it or not for tonight is one of the most popular games right now and so we decided we would put together a machine for a relatively low budget seven hundred seven hundred fifty dollars have been on the sales of the day and see if we could make something both capable of streaming and playing fortnight simultaneously so to add some value to our benchmarks we've got some additional testing on stream throughput so we're looking at viewer side performance what's the experience the viewer gets and then streamer side performance what is their frame rate as they are playing and streaming simultaneously and this is our machine we threw together for it using solve the current Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales and most of those should be ongoing will link the parts below if you want to follow along with this build before that this video is brought to you by us and the just buy it code unlike real time ray tracing our merch actually exists to commemorate the most memorable quote of the year and also Black Friday but mostly the first thing everything in the GM store is 10% off with a discount code just buy it at checkout that includes our most popular item the critically acclaimed GN mod mats our shirts ceramic coffee mugs and GPU component posters and everything else as a bonus this is also a great way to support jion's work the code last through November 26th go to store doc gamers access dotnet or click the link below so the problem with PC builds is everybody always post their list that they know is absolutely superior and it's something that happens a lot because everyone in the audience for the most part has built a computer and so you get this general feeling of superiority because you can put together a system of similar respect for cheaper but the point here today is that we had all these parts we validated them all we've worked with them all and we trust them to be not garbage so the build then comes out with the gtx 1066 gigabyte SC cards about the cheapest 1060 you can get yeah that's the name of it 1060 too much 20 series lately it is a 1060 it's not a 2060 it's a 1066 gigabyte card so it's about 200 bucks after the rebate sometimes a little cheaper or sometimes a little more it kind of fluctuates and then the CPU is an r5 2600 which we awarded our best overall value award for this year out of all the CPUs 160 bucks makes it a very good buy and at 6 cores and 12 threads it's actually a pretty capable CPU for lower quality streaming not low quality but lower you can stream with h.264 very fast which is acceptable very fast as the name of the encoding preset it's fine it's a good one for someone who's really just starting out not really making any money on streaming just kind of interested in it and then you've got options of course with AM for to go with Rison seven instead if you did want that extra Headroom for streaming but we would recommend a better motherboard for that than what we've chosen we've chosen a gigabyte or aspro motherboard technically or as pro Wi-Fi it's what we had it's about a hundred bucks right now speaking with build Zoid we've decided that this board has a good enough erm for six core to be usable in this configuration now it's a bit limited you can't really overclock too much with this board it's $100 what do you expect but it does a good enough job you can set an all core frequency a bit higher than stock and then depending on how the voltage and the CPU bin work out it might go a bit higher on some CPUs than others so for what you get it's a pretty good board the vrm is fine it's not exciting it's not bad it's just okay if you wanted to upgrade a bit we have an m4 video coming out by builds I'd with narration of the best boards and different price brackets if you're curious for memory we have two sticks of Corsair Vengeance lpx 3000 megahertz it's two by four gigabytes so eight total CL 15 it's pretty good times actually and the board and the memory work well together that's important you don't want to play with tertiary secondary timings all day these work fine has an XMPP profile built-in pre pre tuned for you and the power supply is an EVGA 450 watt power supply which actually works out really well because as you'll see in our testing total system power consumptions about 200 230 watts depend on what you're doing so let's go through the parts choices and more depth some of our benchmarks and then we'll talk conclusions about what to make of all of this data on about us 700 $750 PC build for the CPU we're using the r5 2600 we recently gave the CPU our annual award for best overall value which it receives for a new price point of $160 or thereabouts and versatility in gaming streaming and some lightweight production applications Intel does compete with AMD and fiercely so but simply not at this price point this generation if you wanted a last gen product the r7 1700 X can be had for around 170 to 180 dollars although we'd recommend a better motherboard with a stronger vrm to support those extra two cores it will matter on those CPUs Fortnight could be played on a cheaper cpu but the idea here is that you get a mid-range PC capable of a few other things in addition to just fortnight for example lower quality streaming still viewable enough and decent for a starter is possible on the r5 2600 with some tuning as is it gaming a while streaming on the same system for fortnight performance without any active streaming we found the r5 2600 stock CPU and GTX 1066 a gigabyte GPU combination to output a framerate average in 126 fps once at the 1080p high this ties our 1440p high results with the same components and indicates that we're starting to bottleneck on the cpu at 1080p epoch we could sustain 88 FPS average was just completely playable it's just bound to 1080p at this point at 1440p and epic were just below 60 fps a mix of high and epic settings could be used to sustain in the 60s and 70s for frame rate if desired although the game is more about fluid frame throughput than it is about graphics quality to be honest with an active stream we found that faster h.264 encoding settings at 10 megabits per second were just too abusive leading to our YouTube stream output suffering as you can see on the screen we're dropping frames here the viewer site experience resulted in those dropped frames which is a poor experience for the viewer that means you're never gonna get any traction as a streamer streamer side experience and playback is perfectly acceptable but it's more important to have consistently good viewer side playback with minimal drops frames reducing our quality settings to 1080p and high for the game setting a 120 FPS cap for the game which is about the max anyway and configuring OBS to encode with the still acceptable very fast h.264 preset we found that we had a decent stream going that was perfectly viewable by the viewer on the other end of youtube we use twitch style settings here the very fast encoding preset and megabit per second bitrate yielded a 100% encode frame throughput on the cpu we did end up dropping some frames about 10% of them from rendering stalls unfortunately this leads to an average FPS of 54 instead of 64 the viewer but that can still be resolved with a mild overclock or some more settings tweaking this is completely acceptable as a streaming machine for fortnight if using these settings and we'd strongly encourage overclock in the CPU the 3.9 gigahertz are higher as that resolve any dropped frames at higher settings while a mild GPU overclock would resolve those rendering stalls none of this is difficult to do and we have plenty of guides on how to do it if you do want to overclock the CPU we did encourage getting an aftermarket cooler the stock cooler is perfectly fine for stock settings it works well enough especially the H 500 case which is decent overall for cooling stock it's just that once you start overclocking and pushing more volts you will need some additional cooling power we have a few cooler alternatives linked in the article below and in the description below if you'd like to check one of those out while you're buying the rest of the parts for this PC just to give you some overclocking the Headroom thermally the GPU is next the EVGA SC gtx 1066 gigabyte was selected for the GPU as it's available between 200 and 220 dollars depending on the sales that are live when you check this video list price is closer to 240 or 250 but it's regularly marked down right now and there's a pretty good deal you can check again the links below to find the most up-to-date price to go through the same benchmarks or a couple of additional benchmarks actually here's how the gtx 1060 and r5 2600 combination perform in our standard cpu review test suite at 1080p and high settings our system runs f1 2018 at 120 FPS average was 1% lows at 59 fps across multiple passes 0.1% lows always drag in this specific game but it's not dismal it's just what it normally does this isn't bad for an r5 2600 and gtx 1066 gigabyte combination with both devices fully stock no overclocking here far cry 5 at normal settings and 1080p operates at 82 FPS average with it lows tightly behind at 62 FPS and 55 FPS this 1% low frame rate performance for frame time performance is indicative of an overall consistent framed every time and we don't see any stutters during gameplay that's really what we're going for here especially for a mid-range build GTA 5 under very high and ultra settings effectively max except we're using FXAA and no advanced graphics options runs at 98 FPS average and 63 FPS for the 1% lows this is strong performance for GTA 5 putting us just near 100 FPS average that is and perfectly acceptable for our build finally total war at war hammers a CPU intensive title and under high settings it's again pretty abusive on the CPU but we still manage over 100 FPS in this RTS and grand strategy game which is completely acceptable once again 1440p is also fairly playable if you wanted to capitalize on the recent price reductions in 1440p monitors and will link one of those below as well we're at 80 FPS average for the f1 2018 55 FPS average for far cry 5 with normal settings and 72 FPS average for GTA 5 under nearly maxed settings this is completely playable at 1440p and 1080p alike although 1080p allows for more Headroom for graphics setting increases and we showed fortnight earlier that one does struggle a bit at epic settings you'd want to go down too high for 1440p with fortnight memory has finally come down a bit in price and is fortunately unimpacted by the impending tariff hike on January 1st for memory we chose the $75 kit of Corsair 3000 Deckard's lpx Vengeance Ram CL 15 and elected to just run it at XMP the CL 15 timings are good overall and don't require any manual tweaking on the gigabyte pro motherboard that we're using you can find other 3000 megahertz kits for around 70 bucks or even a bit cheaper but we've previously validated that this kit works well with the gigabyte p450 ARS pro and that's what we're using so we chose to stick with what we know works because we know it works and why fight with memory if you don't have to it's an extra five to ten dollars over some team memory for example but that's not going to break the bank and it works again so it's easy to put in and just use you'll want to avoid the 20 400 megahertz kits that may tempt you at $60 because the speed difference is actually tangible in many use cases with Rison and we've previously demonstrated that and I rise in 2000 series release content if your cure to see why and how much it can affect performance we gave NZXT an award for its age 500 this year which manages to reform surprisingly well with its completely negative pressure configuration NZXT sh 500 has the biggest contributions in quality of life and ease of installation features which make it trivial to work with and easy to make a good looking system and a relatively small ATX tower case kill management has predefined paths laid out making it easy for a new builder to make sure the backside of the system is also tidy and the pre-installed fans are actually pretty good dust filters are also pre-installed where they'd make sense for a negative pressure system so just make sure you maintain them and it should be good to go at roughly $70 this one is a good buy for a mid-range gaming PC like what we're building today if you wanted to spend less though and allocate some money elsewhere although it's getting old and stale the Corsair 270 R is still a good deal it's just again it's a bit old but it's a case so they don't really change that much over the years it's about $40 with rebates these days and we've been recommending it going on three years now in november content actually almost almost like an annual trend at this point it's one of the better ones at the price we do prefer the aged 500 but that price difference it may matter for some of you and if it does the 270 R is a good alternative cooling is acceptable in this one and can be easily expanded on and that's also true for the 270 R for the power supply will use the EVGA 450 watt BT 80 plus bronze PSU this isn't non-modular but its power rating is perfect for our system if you're concerned that 450 Watts doesn't sound like enough we ran some total system power consumption tests and found the following under a heavy workload for this system of fortnight with live encoding via OBS we measured a power consumption at an average peak of 230 watts with non streams fortnight gameplay at 200 watts blender on the CPU only ran 140 watts and GTA 5 ran 200 watts with total war at 205 watts a 450 watt power supply then is just about perfect as it puts us right at the peak efficiency point in the efficiency curve this one is currently about $40 after discounts making it good for our lower tier two mid-range system if you wanted to step it up to something a bit higher quality the supernova also an EVGA power supply at 750 watts and modeled g1 plus is currently on sale for 60 dogs it's about 20 more but that discount ends in a few days so keep that in mind it's an 80 plus gold unit it is better but it's also completely overkill just for the record for the system and for the motherboard we chose the gigabyte be 450 Pro Wi-Fi this choice was entirely dictated by what we had available and what we've tested as you'll see in our upcoming best I am for roundup buy builds I'd we'd actually prefer something similar to the B 450 tomahawk for an affordable low-end board with an 8 core CPU but the B 450 Pro saves us some money as vrm is still completely sufficient for six core CPU that's also with build Zoids validation on that fact if you do jump on one of the r7 instead of the r5 we would recommend upgrading the motherboard for something with a stronger vrm to better handle the thermal requirements of an 8 core especially with overclocking the B 450 Pro is about $100 right now making it a good financial fit for the build and plenty capable for what we're working with ok then so now that we've tested things we would improve or consider improving if you're building something like this Thor 5 2600 is still a great deal it does become a bit limited and it will become more limited in games that are more CPU intensive so things you can do you can either upgrade to an r7 if you are genuinely trying to stream because this build remember it's possible to play fortnight for way cheaper you don't need to go this you barely need really much of anything to play fortnight at reasonable settings so you can go away cheaper than this but that's not the point the point is that this can also stream the game while playing it so there's some versatility there you get it's a mid-range build depending your definition of that and as a mid-range build it also has capabilities to do things like lightweight production tasks maybe you want to cut some clips together of playing the game with your friends this is completely capable of doing that without slowing things down you've got CUDA acceleration for premiere you have a decent CPU so it's good all around her but our seven would be a decent consideration if you did that you would want to go with a better motherboard check our best am 4 motherboards video for suggestions on those you could further tune the software side of things to get stuff working a bit better if you want the stream to be improved quality so options would be overclocking the GPU it's trivial you can do it in a couple minutes and stress tested over an hour to dial the settings you'll be good to go that would help with some of those dropped render some of the the render stalls that we saw in our stream viewer side testing where we were at 92% delivery instead of a hundred so that would help their CPU it's worth considering a bit of an overclock you can't get a ton out of this motherboard but you can get a little bit so 3.9 4.0 gigahertz should be achievable on most CPUs and then if you run into some thermal issues there which is definitely possible depending on the volt frequency table you might end up wanting to upgrade the cooler you can get a better cooler for about let's call it $30 for a pretty good one maybe 25 depending something like the thermal take contact 12 contact silent 12 which is effectively a hyper 212 also a decent option although we don't really like it these days because it's age is showing a lot but those are both better than this for the most part so options there if you did want to do some overclocking you run into thermal issues to ban your voltage motherboards a limiter as well but for what you get it's really not a bad system it's just not something that you can do a whole lot of tuning with now in the OS you can do a lot you could do you could do a process lasso you could do process prioritization for OBS you could artificially limit the framerate this is a big one for fortnight so if you're ok with going down to 60fps in your game maybe you're only outputting 60 anyway so to some extent who cares and you're not old you're competitive if you can limit to 60 and you don't feel terrible about it or you can use external software and limits to something like eighty or a hundred that would be pretty reasonable that gives your CPU some additional processing Headroom to handle the stream and that would be a good setup so you can definitely get pretty far with this in a start up streaming career with just some manual tweaking and the OS and I'll teach you a bit too and it's perfectly capable it's not the absolute best streaming setup to use because something like an r7 I 709 would be easier out-of-the-box to work with but this is fully capable and the I sevens I should mention if they're just eight core eight thread like the 9700 K will also limit you in some way so keep that in mind too so overall the builds fine you can pick up Vanessa steeper I should and mechanical drive for archival storage maybe about one or two terabytes something like that for relatively cheap right now as the see prices are through the floor at the moment and will continue to go down so don't feel a mad rush to buy one because they'll keep going down into 2019 especially quarter one yeah overall we're pretty happy with the build with its performance with its price you can get stuff that's a bit cheaper depending on when you check the prices and what your priorities are but ours were a motherboard we knew was in complete garbage it's got a good enough erm for some basic overclocks we wanted a video card that had CUDA acceleration for any sort of premiere tasks or if you did want to push some streaming lightweight streaming workload off to envy encoder for example and you get both of those with this plus the memory is a good spec for frequency and timings and it's all pretty configured in the board so you don't have to do any work there and that's it for this one so feel free to leave your need for validation below if you'd like to say how much better you are than us at doing anything relating to pcs that's what people always do with these types of content pieces I've seen you do it to Paul and I will continue to do what I want so thanks for watching subscribe for more go to patreon.com slash gamers exit subset Rick Lee we're gonna store it I Kara's exes net it's picking for one of our mod mats like this one or one of our shirts like this one I'll see you all next time