Gadgetory

so you're a seasoned PC gamer wondering how to make your gaming experience more social but without inviting people into your house then you get the utterly unique and one-of-a-kind idea to start streaming your gameplay you sprang into action preparing to show your battle station off to the world but what kind of setup do you need to pull this off well hey guys it shouldn't be surprising but an upper range gaming PC is often a good choice for streaming but there are Hardware considerations for streaming that are a little bit different typically gaming setups are built around the GPU with your graphics card often being the deciding factor in how nice your games will look as long as the rest of your rig meets some kind of minimum threshold but for streaming your CPU can determine how your gameplay looks to your viewers be they on Twitch or another streaming platform but why is this I mean we're still talking about how to get the best graphical quality right well remember that the work of rendering the game that is the act of actually creating the image has already been done by your graphics card it's been your CPU that takes that rendered image and transcodes it into a video format that can be easily sent over the internet and displayed by your viewers web browsers and if you've ever edited video regularly you'll probably already know that having a more powerful CPU typically makes video encoding a much easier job now since transcoding is easily split amongst multiple CPU cores oh by the way don't forget you still have to run the game - it is to your advantage to get a CPU with more cores and more threads especially if you want to stream at 1080p 60fps instead of 720p though it should be noted that as with anything there is a point of diminishing returns and an 18 core processor might not be worth the extra price if you want a specific recommendation a modern six core Core i7 or more or AMD risin seven processor or better in your gaming rig should make it a very capable streaming machine some streamers though actually decide to go a step further and use a second PC to handle all the streaming tasks using their first rig strictly for actual gaming this can especially make sense if you already have an older tower lying around because it's a great way to stream CPU intensive games like Starcraft or total war without being concerned that your gameplay or your stream quality will suffer as a result and one of the reasons this approach is so popular is that your streaming PC doesn't have to be anything super fancy you might not even need a dedicated graphics card you will need a good CPU but because it's going to be handling streaming only you can probably get away with a more basic fork or four thread processor just make sure that you close all your background programs and have only what you need to stream up and running if you're running into trouble the other thing you'll need for your dedicated streaming PC is a way to capture the video output from your gaming machine and deliver it to the software that will encode and transmit your stream along with any overlays and transitions that you desire for PC gamers this can actually be done over your local network using the NV NC Hardware encoding engine behind Nvidia shadowplay feature to send up to a 60 megabit stream of the game over Ethernet to your secondary box where CPU encoding will turn it into a high quality 5.5 megabit Stream compatible with twitch TV but if your PC hardware doesn't support this method or if you're streaming from another device like a game console the go-to is a capture card a modern USB 3 or PCI Express capture card will help prevent transmission problems and Legg compared to a USB 2 capture card but other than that you'll probably have to read or watch reviews to determine exactly which model is best for your needs whatever you get though make sure that it supports the resolution and frame rate that you want to broadcast this episode was brought to you by tunnel bear the easy-to-use VPN app when people are shopping for a VPN one of the features they look for is called a kill switch before you connect to your network your device actually starts to send information about itself and what it wants to do and it tries to establish connections with all sorts of things and there are other devices trying to connect to yours kill switches stop all this from happening before you connect to your VPN all your traffic is unencrypted too so in the few seconds it takes to connect you've probably already broadcast your IP maybe a few DNS requests or even a search query Vigilant bear from tunnel bear stops this from happening by blocking all outbound and inbound traffic so nothing leaks out before you connect this helps keep you private throughout your entire connection time and if your connection goes down for some reason vigilant bear kicks back in and stops the traffic again until the connection comes back for a free trial of tunnel bear go to tunnel bear comm slash Linus we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out other channels leave a comment if you have suggestions for future videos and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any amazing tech quickies just like this one