Best Budget Twitch Setup? Creating a Live Streaming Setup from Scratch for Under $300!

hello everybody what is going on my name is steggy and in this video I'm going to be teaching you how to create a live streaming setup for a twitch YouTube Facebook mixer etc for under $300 so this is sort of a follow-up to my last video where I went over how to create a budget YouTube set up for under $100 and the point of this video series is to show you don't need to sync thousands of dollars into your setup in order to create great-looking content so if you ever thought man I'd love to get into content creation but I don't have that much money to sink into it I just want to show you that you can get great-looking results for just a couple hundred dollars okay so before I get into the setup I want to cover what this setup entails because there are a couple of underlying assumptions here one is that you have a TV or monitor to play on and two that you have a mouse or keyboard in order to control things on your computer so if you don't have these and you're really on a budget you can go to a flea market or like a goodwill and pick these up for next to nothing I guess another underlying assumption is that you have like a home to play in with like electricity and Internet but I think that those are kind of prerequisites that we can agree that if you're watching this video you meet so this set up I've created covers a computer that's capable of both streaming playing games or doing both at the same time a mic so your audience can hear you a webcam so your audience can see you and how you can light everything up so it all looks good so first let's start with the PC now one of the inspirations of this video came from another YouTube channel called alpha gaming where Harrison is friend Andy came across a computer at a university surplus store for $40 now this is one of those computers at the University used in their library or media lab so people can get on the internet or do projects depending on what the school was so this computer ended up having a fourth generation i7 in it and it got me thinking about how many capable and fairly powerful machines there are out there that you know people sort of just forget about because there are a number of years old so to be clear finding a fourth generation i7 computer for $40 is not the norm it's sort of like coming across a copy of earthbound at a flea market for a couple of dollars it can happen but it's pretty rare however we can still take this idea and apply towards creating a super capable set up that'll get your live stream up and running all right so in order to get one of these workstations I turn to the Internet I purchased this from new eggs used section this is an HP elite desk either 600 or 800 but you can actually look on eBay and possibly even get a better deal on these because I've seen some listings where these will be under fifty dollars like forty seven dollars and like $13 shipping however the difference is those computers don't ship with an operating system so if you do have a copy of Windows 10 or a key more specifically for it then you can save twenty to twenty-five dollars but for me I spent ninety dollars on this machine from Newegg all right so this computer actually has some pretty great bones here it's got a fourth generation Core i5 4570 CPU and then it's got a 450 watt power supply in it and it's got a surprising amount of USB ports it's got four on the front and another six in the back so pretty great but we do need to make a couple of upgrades before this guy is stream ready so first up is the RAM because this computer came with four gigs of RAM which is simply not enough now unfortunately the fourth-generation i5 uses ddr3 RAM which is a little bit more expensive but if you go on ebay you can regularly find 16 gigs of ddr3 for around 30 to 35 dollars now the next upgrade I want to make here is putting an SSD in here because I haven't used a spinning hard disk for my operating system in about 10 years and so this is more just for my sanity if you want to get an SSD you can find them used on eBay starting at around 17 dollars but if you really want to buy new you can go to Amazon and you're looking more at like 25 to 30 dollars what's cool about this computer is that you can remove a lot of parts without any tools so you can just pop the hard drive out of there unplug the SATA cable and the power connector and then just plug in your SSD and you're good to go I didn't have a sled for my so it's just sort of dangling in the case but there's not really an issue with that so I just went with the path of least resistance there now the last upgrade is also the most expensive upgrade and that is adding a GPU to this system rather than relying on the integrated graphics now my strategy here is to make the GPU the hero because the GPU can take on all the work for encoding while the rest of the system like the processor and everything just keeps the lights on so the GPU can really get to work okay so for a kind of basic explanation on how a computer is used in live streaming when you livestream you use an encoding software like OBS to take the video incoming either from display capture or from a capture card and it encodes that signal into a package that it can then send a twitch or YouTube to display to all of your viewers out there so in order to do this it uses resource of resources from your system like your CPU or your GPU kind of like a computer uses your CPU and GPU in order to play the game now if you're using a single PC system to both play your game and live stream the problem is these are both intensive tasks and if your computer's not up to snuff it's gonna have problems doing both and even good computers can sometimes have trouble basically allocating their resources to the game or the streaming software and so it's stuck on what to do so either your frames might drop in game or your frames might drop on your stream now a couple of years ago and video started adding these special chips to their GPUs known as n bank encoders and basically what that means is there are these special dedicated chips that all they do is in code video in software that supports it so OBS has and then concluding which says hey the power that we need to send the video to twitch or YouTube is in this special little chip gear so if we take the resources from here we're not going to affect your frames while you're gaming so if you have a GPU that has that chip you can do a single PC stream setup where you're playing the games and live-streaming at the same time with no ill effects so we need to get one of these NVIDIA GPUs but I'm looking for a very specific one for this system because it's got to meet a few criteria number one it's got to be at least a gtx ten series the reason being is over the different generations of an vanships the quality has gotten better and better however that is to say that it wasn't until the ten series where the quality of ending actually started to contend with x264 processing which is the CPU processing in an encoding software now it wasn't until the twenty series of GPUs where n think actually looked as good as x264 but basically there's only a 15 percent difference between the N Vanka of a 10 series and the end bank of a 20 series GPU and the criterion number two which rules out the 20 series GPUs is I want this to cost less than $100 and criteria number three I need this GPU to be low profile for two reasons number one this is a small form-factor PC so full size GPU simply won't fit in here but also number two and these little business workstation like pcs their power supplies don't have extra cords that can basically power GPUs so with low profile GPUs they actually draw all of their power from the PCIe Lane so you don't have to have a direct line from the power supply to the graphics card which is exactly what we need for this setup so with all these parameters I ended up going with the GTX 1050 low profile GPU you can get these on eBay for around 80 to $100 however if you're willing to spend a little bit more money you could get a gtx 1050 TI which will give you better performance in your gaming and basically get you more frames and you can get those for around 125 on ebay so this takes care of the PC let's move on to peripherals let's start with the webcam now it really shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm going with the Logitech c920 here because for the price point it's really the only game in town you can buy these on amazon new for $50 or if you're looking to save some money you can buy them used on Craigslist or Ebay for around $30 now I would recommend if you are looking to save that extra dollar to purchases used on those sites versus buying a no-name webcam on Amazon for the same price because the difference between a no-name $30 webcam this used for $30 is quite jarring so next up for the microphone I started seeing this company called five fine pop up on a few YouTube videos and after giving this a whirl it actually sounds pretty good for the price so they have two models on Amazon they have the case six six nine for $30 and then they have the case 670 for $40 basically the only differences between them is the case six seventy has a detachable USB cable and it comes with a better mic stand so depending on your budget you could go with either of these and they're gonna sound basically the same so with everything added together here we're at two hundred and ninety seven dollars but you might be asking where are the lights in this setup well you can actually use the lighting found in your house already now I'm not necessarily saying bring all your floor lamps over to your streaming setup though that is an option however there is one little hack you can use where you can actually take your monitors and use those as your lighting source and to do this all you need to do is bring up a bright webpage like Google comm and make sure you're on light mode if you do this the light coming off the monitors is actually sufficient enough to give you adequate lighting with a c920 depending on how far away your monitors are from you and obviously as your channel grows the next item on your list can be soft boxes for 30 or 40 dollars but to start out you can just use your monitors for your lighting source all right so this is a video and audio quality sample of the Logitech c920 and the five fine K 670 microphone so right now I'm using zero lighting for this setup besides the light coming off of my monitors right here so I just have a new tab open chroma sets a light mode so very bright images on here and if you notice if I switch over to something darker then it looks a lot worse here so basically you just want to be in light mode if you're going through this method of lighting your stream one thing to keep in mind is if you are a glasses wearer like myself then that can cause reflections and your glasses during your stream so you know basically to avoid that that's when you start getting the softbox lighting which you place off axis so you can avoid though reflections but you know when you're streaming on a budget you just gotta make you you could either wear contacts or just deal with the reflections because it's not the worst thing in the world and so then just to show off the microphone here again this is the K 670 version with a nicer headphone stand and the detachable cable but I'm just gonna speak a little closer into this to give you an idea of what it sounds like when you're speaking very close to the microphone like if you have it on a mic arm or something and they do have this little gain dial so I can turn it down and then I can raise my voice to a more normalized level without having the microphone clip hopefully I'm not listening to it right now then one thing to note about this setup right now is I actually have the c920 on top of one of my 27-inch monitor so this is what like your normal desk setup would look like on a normal desk and having the webcam there but actually I found that placing the webcam a little closer to me the perspective is a little bit more level I couldn't raise it a bit to help that but I actually think that this looks better with me being closer to the webcam the lighting source has not changed but the picture does look dramatically better than when the webcam was farther away so you know take that for what it's worth if you have like a little tripod you can put on your desk if you're you know maybe playing with controller then it won't get in your way if you're doing mouse and keyboard then you're gonna have to figure out something there so you can have the webcam be nice and close and be nice quality without stopping you from actually playing your game as far as the lighting behind me goes if you have any kind of RGB lights or Philips hue lights or Nana leaves things of that nature the trick to get those to appear good on this webcam is you need to basically turn them down to one percent they need to barely be on because anything more than like the one percent and then they're blown out and it just looks absolutely awful so it doesn't look that great to people coming in but you know that right now I'm using these four on camera so just dialing them back down to one percent is getting me the results that I want so firing up fortnight I basically had to set it to the lowest graphics settings besides the viewing distance which I had set too far and then it was set to 1080p 60 with g-sync to get the results that I wanted but this was a completely playable experience and when I live-streamed it the people watching it thought everything looked and sounded great once I balanced out my mic with the gameplay volume I don't know how other games will fare on this system though so you might really need to play around with the graphics settings like playing in 720p in order to get good frames when you're playing but this is actually where today's technology really comes in handy because if the game you want to play is available on Google stadia I highly suggest using that for this system because you're getting the full quality picture from stadia servers basically like a Netflix video feed and then all your computer has to do is just display capture and then stream it which is a lot easier on the computer than doing gaming and streaming at once lastly this computer does have multiple USB 3.0 ports as well as two PCIe x1 it in HD 60 Pro here to capture some console footage so if you're looking to capture consoles or do a two PC setup this computer is very capable of doing that thanks to its ports so with everything considered here I think we have a pretty amazing setup for live streaming especially with this PC here because I honestly think that streamers of any size could make great use out of this thing now I know in this video I talk mostly about the brand-new user who doesn't own a gaming PC so this acts as your gaming system and your streaming system but I honestly think this shines a hundred times more as a dedicated stream PC if you already own a gaming system because if you're looking for whatever upgrades you might need to turn your gaming system into something that can support gaming and live streaming you could either upgrade your GPU to something with that end bank chip in it or you could build this PC and add an internal capture card for a total price of around $300 and now you have a dual PC setup now the benefits of the dual PC system is if your gaming PC ever crashes which can happen quite a bit your stream wont go offline you won't lose viewers because your stream is being handled by a completely separate piece of hardware so that's why I love this thing because it has a ton of connectivity so you can capture a gaming PC console multiple cameras if you wanted to so there are a lot of possibilities here so you know if you are a new user and you start out with this as your gaming and your streaming PC and let's say that your channel starting to take off and you want to start making upgrades let's say you want to enjoy your games in a better resolution or frame rate well you can invest in a gaming PC and turn this into your streaming PC and so you can still get great use out of this the same goes for your webcam if you want to graduate from the quality that you'd get from this webcam because of those PCIe lanes or the USB ports you can upgrade to a cam link and then use mirrorless cameras which will make your quality a lot better so honestly there are a lot of possibilities here and it can sort of make your head spin but that's what's really great about this setup I think is that it's great for streamers of all sizes honestly you know maybe not every product but you know there's something here for everybody but then when you build this system it can actually grow with you as your channel grow so I think that's really special now if you have any questions about this setup which I'm sure you might because I went over quite a lot here or if you have any suggestions of your own for this setup be sure to leave a comment down below and again everything I discuss in this video is linked in the description panel and if you're new here be sure to hit that subscribe button for more great videos once again my name is steggy and that's on my next video I'll catch you guys later

Channel: Steggy

Views: 267,628

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Id: exB7mfFvXfU

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020