Best way to share my pixelated farming with others

September 16, 2017 10:15 AM

I'd like to build a budget-range gaming PC capable of Twitch streaming some low-medium fidelity games (more Stardew Valley than PUBG). What's a good target?

I am really enjoying playing Stardew Valley and would like to start streaming a few times a week via Twitch or a similar service. I'm also a resource-strapped grad student.

I'm currently playing SV on a 2013 Macbook Air, which works great for the game itself, but I'm guessing it would start to chug noticeably when doing any kind of streaming (even, I presume, with some kind of external capture card -- or am I wrong here?) Plus I think it would be helpful to have another PC so I can use the laptop for chat and moderation.

What level of build should I be shooting for on Logical Increments or similar sites? Any specifics you'd recommend I grab? I would likely want to stream similar types of games in the future, and it would be neat if I could at least handle a moderate level of 3D gaming too (stuff like the Life is Strange prequel, possibly Overwatch).

I would love to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 with as close to the lower end as possible. Also I'm using this as an opportunity to teach myself new things (going to install a Linux distro in addition to Windows) and I would especially like to find build that is likely to last a while and gives me the option to upgrade in the future to a turbocharged graphics card or whatever.

Thanks!

posted by elephantsvanish to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

The 'modest' build with the RX 460 graphics card and 8GB of RAM is not a bad starting point on logicalincrements.com. The 'fair' build with the GTX 1050 would be better if you decided that 3D gaming were more important to you than you thought, but that may go over budget.

That said, if you just want to be super cheap right now, a second monitor for your Macbook would help a lot with streaming. As for capturing content to stream, I hear good things about this Elgato (link is to a refurbished one).
posted by destructive cactus at 10:50 AM on September 16, 2017

or am I wrong here? Maybe? That's a pretty powerful machine, and SV is not exactly a resource hog. You have to be careful though, e.g. Dwarf Fortress can tax even pretty good computers with its demands, even though it uses ASCII graphics.

Anyway, why not try it before you buy/build more? Use the Activity Monitor to see how much an instance of SV uses, see if you can Skype/Twitch simultaneously, etc.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:52 AM on September 16, 2017

Best answer: You shouldn't need a whole new machine unless you're looking for an excuse to build a whole new machine in which case, Overwatch will probably be happier with an RX 480 or 1060 6GB but those video cards are up around $250-300 on their own.

Download OBS. In OBS go to the Output section, hit up the Streaming tab and if you're running a recent macOS (10.8 or later IIRC) there'll be an option for VT H.264. That VT stands for "videotoolbox", an API built into macOS to hardware accelerate encoding and decoding of digital video.

Your Macbook Air CPU has a Quicksync ASIC built into it which will accelerate the encoding without using CPU time. So if you just want to stream Stardew Valley it'll probably do it all happily with your existing kit.

If you can wait until Octoberish the value segment is going to get a shot in the arm when Intel brings out Coffee Lake with quad core on the i3 instead of dual core. You can get last year's quad core for a third of the price.
posted by Talez at 5:43 PM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

Seconding to try it out with what you have; it's probably adequate for streaming 2D stuff like Stardew Valley, especially if you limit the framerate and resolution of the stream.

If you want an entry-level gaming machine that can handle some basic 3D gaming, I'd personally recommend looking at buying a used machine, or putting together a machine with used parts, as even with a $500 budget, you're sacrificing quite a bit by trying to use new parts. Or alternately, save up a few hundred more so you can afford the better bang-for-buck parts, if you insist on buying new.
posted by Aleyn at 2:13 AM on September 17, 2017