Recommended Upgrades for Game Recording

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backtits

backtits

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Dec 3, 2012
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So I'm currently running with a HD 7870 GPU from Sapphire paired with a Pentium G860. Obviously the most glaring change I need to make is that CPU, however would it be advantageous to go i7 over i5? I've read mixed reviews online about the subject and as I understand it i7 would help more with post-processing, not the actual recording. However like I said, this has been refuted in certain places during my research.

I'm also running 8GBs of RAM (any specs you guys need, don't hesitate to ask. I'll pull em up from speccy right away), two 7200RPM HDD's, one 500GB that has just my OS on it and the other is a 1TB storage drive(I bought them one after the other, that's why I have a 500GB HDD instead of a smaller SSD for my OS), a Gigabyte H61M-DS2H mobo and Windows 7 64-bit SP1.

Any recommendations would be fantastic. I'm aiming for 1080p recording, though I've no quams about downgrading to 720p (to me, they both look good enough to be worth uploading and watching). I'll be playing SWTOR, Guild Wars 2, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls series, The Witcher Series, Mass Effect series, and potentially a lot more. Not sure if any of that information matters, but hey, thought I might as well let you guys know.
 
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manofchalk
An i7 would benefit you over an i5 if you intend to encode your footage on the fly (reduces file size of footage, you need less storage capacity and performance but introduces a massive CPU load). There is dedicated hardware for this purpose (Avermedia Live Gamer capture cards for instance) which would offset the load from the CPU.

EDIT: If you decide to upgrade your graphics card later on, Nvidia would be a good option. Most Kepler cards have their own inbuilt H.264 encoder built in which you can use through Nvidia ShadowPlay. Removes the need for a dedicated card for this purpose.

8GB of RAM is fine, storage may need a bit of improvement. What kind of storage performance you need will depend on the quality of the footage (resolution...
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manofchalk

manofchalk

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May 11, 2012
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An i7 would benefit you over an i5 if you intend to encode your footage on the fly (reduces file size of footage, you need less storage capacity and performance but introduces a massive CPU load). There is dedicated hardware for this purpose (Avermedia Live Gamer capture cards for instance) which would offset the load from the CPU.

EDIT: If you decide to upgrade your graphics card later on, Nvidia would be a good option. Most Kepler cards have their own inbuilt H.264 encoder built in which you can use through Nvidia ShadowPlay. Removes the need for a dedicated card for this purpose.

8GB of RAM is fine, storage may need a bit of improvement. What kind of storage performance you need will depend on the quality of the footage (resolution and refresh rate) and whether its encoded or not. Also its a matter of how much you need as well, recording hour long game sessions uncompressed is going to eat up 1TB pretty quick.
A fairly safe storage setup would be a dedicated RAID0 array (say dual 1 or 2TB drives), that would be able to handle pretty much whatever with programs/OS/general storage on separate drive/s.
 
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backtits

backtits

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Dec 3, 2012
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Thanks for the great responses everyone! Just a couple of questions.

First, @kelvin08113: The reason I went with the chipset I have is because I didn't need the features of anything higher, plus it was cheap. I'd read it was a good entry level chipset, which was exactly what I needed. Could you, or anyone, give me some more information into the types of things I should look for when choosing a mobo chipset?

And second, @manofchalk: I'm not sure what encoding my footage on the fly really means. I was planning on just recording the footage, and then compressing it or doing whatever I need to do to it in order to upload it to youtube. So would/should I get this Avermedia Live Gamer capture card AND an i7, or are you saying that I could go with an i5 as opposed to the i7 if I were to get the caputre card? Also, I wasn't planning on upgrading my GPU until it becomes more obsolete. As far as I know it's still pretty good, unless I'm mistaken. So I'm not planning for an upgrade for awhile, but I will definitely look into and consider an NVIDIA card.

::EDIT:: Alrighty, so I've looked up a bit more about RAID0 and so far I'm getting a bit more confused. I'm just gonna put my understanding on the table, and wherever I go wrong let me know. Technically a SSD is better in terms of read/write speeds, correct? So maybe I should have a SSD for my OS, recording software, (anything else?) and then have a RAID0 configuration for a pair of 1TB harddrives where I would write and store my recorded footage. The paired HDDs wouldn't be the same in terms of speed as the SSD, but it'd be far superior than simply writing to 1 drive, and having the actual software running off of the SSD would improve... Something? I'm not sure. That's why I wanted to ask, would there be any benefit at all to having an SSD and two RAID0 1TB HDDs? Or is that a waste of time, and I should just stick with two RAID0 HDDs.
 
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manofchalk

manofchalk

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May 11, 2012
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Encoding is turning the raw footage into a compressed format, it is mostly what happens when you render a final product out of something like Premiere.
I'm saying that with dedicated hardware for this purpose, the need for a stronger CPU is lessened as its not taking the load. You might still want the stronger chip for other purposes (say during editing or something).

SSD's are faster, yes...
This is mainly true in random read/writes, which is why it excels in tasks like an OS or programs drive as the data being accessed is relatively random. In terms of Sequential Writes, HDD's don't fall too far behind and can overtake SSD's if for instance its a RAID0 array.

The SSD for OS/Programs with a RAID0 HDD storage is what I would go with.
Having the OS and software wont increase performance directly, but generally using the machine will feel a lot faster. It boots quicker, applications open faster and all that. This video shows it fairly well, though is a bit old so prices have changed a fair bit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lR0XoHFU6Y
 
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backtits

backtits

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Dec 3, 2012
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Awesome, thanks again for all the support. Now one more question if you don't mind; do I need a better mother board then I currently have in order to efficiently run a raid 0 set up? Also any recommendations for the drives i should use?
 
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