Yes, you can stream with this PC.
Yes, you can stream with this PC.
Hello! Your setup includes an i5-6500, an RX 470, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. This should comfortably handle streaming games like Minecraft, CS:GO, and GTA V.
Hey! Finally a chip that’s slower than mine! (I’m ahead with the 4770k). It’s a 2015 model with four cores. Your graphics card won’t handle streaming well, so it’d need more cores. You probably don’t have enough. Those games are single-threaded, though—maybe it’s still possible. This processor isn’t very fast, which could slow things down during streaming. If it works, it’ll likely be a modest performance.
It seems your PC briefly powers up, shuts off after a few seconds, then restarts, with fans running but no screen visible.
A 2600k might be considered an i7 despite its specs. It runs at 4/8 and can be overclocked, though its IPC is significantly lower. A 4/8 configuration would benefit from more threads, which this model already has. It operates as a 4/4 processor for many tasks, which usually means it won’t outperform a 2/4 i3 in most scenarios. Multithreading isn’t active, but disabling it could allow overclocking without affecting performance too much. If you adjust those settings, the 2600k might lag behind a 4/4 i3. However, doing so rarely happens, suggesting multithreaded workloads likely gave it an edge. Upgrading to a 6th gen i7 would probably give a noticeable speed boost, though its base clock wasn’t very high. The 8th gen i7 offers more than just higher clocks—it still lags behind in real-world performance due to limited overclock potential. The main advantage of the 4th gen i7 is its strong IPC, which helped AMD gain ground despite lower clock speeds. My current setup, a 2014 4th gen i7, handles modern games like Tina’s well, even though my monitor can’t fully utilize it. (Edited August 7, 2022 by Bombastinator)
The RX 470 includes a built-in video encoder, which means it can handle video encoding in OBS with AMF support. The main drawback is the video quality isn’t very high compared to NVIDIA’s solutions—raising the bitrate significantly often leads to glitches. You could try software encoding with x264, but this would consume CPU resources, reducing available cores and causing lower frame rates in games. While Minecraft might tolerate it, titles like GTA V and CS would likely notice a noticeable performance drop due to using CPU instead of hardware encoding.
It's just that some adjustable settings are largely ignored and fixed regardless of your attempts. If you push for better performance, you encounter problems such as empty frames and similar issues. My machine is an RX 570 with 4 GB RAM, essentially acting like an overclocked RX 470 – the chipset remains identical in both units. For instance, I tested Metro Exodus twice using the standard settings: medium quality, 4x autofocus, no extra effects, and no NVIDIA tweaks. Once I switched the hardware encoder to CBR 6000 kbps (but turned off zero-filling when bitrate drops below 6 Mbps since streaming isn't active), and once I used x264 encoding on the faster preset, the results varied. With hardware encoding I achieved about 38.15 fps, around 4% CPU load for OBS (mainly for audio to AAC), while with x264 it averaged 51 fps and roughly 19% CPU usage. The hardware encoder consumes memory – likely about 128 MB – which can impact the 4 GB buffer, especially when Metro Exodus fills it. Additionally, depending on your capture options, there are many memory copies, converting frames to the encoding buffer, changing color spaces, etc. In this scenario, the hardware encoder actually leads to a noticeable drop in FPS. In less demanding games, the effect is milder. I've shared the two-minute clips for both settings; you can view them here: obs – Google Drive (76 MB each). Edit: I also recorded one with x264 preset ultrafast – CPU stayed under 5%, but quality is slightly lower than hardware encoding. You'll see the impact of hardware encoding on the FPS chart clearly.