Hey all! I’m having some real trouble putting together a futuristic monster of a streaming build. Normally when streaming (I mean streaming things like small sporting events and concerts, not video games), you’ll have an outboard controller that lets you switch between different video streams, but IMO. computers are becoming so good nowadays that you should be able to take in every video stream and handle them in the streaming software, giving you MUCH more control, flexibility and automatability (Not a word).
So, as a bit of an experiment, we’re trying to build a machine to do that, make it rack-mounted, and take it out on streaming jobs.
Here’s what we’ll need, that I’m having some trouble finding a good combination of:
CPU with focus on speed over extreme core-count
Integrated graphics so we don’t need a graphics card that’ll take up a PCIe slot
Compatible motherboard with (hopefully) at least four 4x PCIe slots for capture cards
At first I wanted to go AMD, but couldn’t find any available motherboards that didn’t spend all the precious PCI lanes on one massive 16x slot that we didn’t need. However on Intel, there seemed to be some good options with the 2066 socket, but alas, no integrated graphics.
Haven’t considered that yet, but of course, that may be the answer! How would that work when the cards are mounted? Because I assume that would either elevate the cards, or change the orientation 90 degrees, right?
Or what Gigabyte does and literally splits the X16 to dual X8 and from that point you can split each X8 into dual x4…
Or wait for Thread ripper 5000 and have all the PCIe, all the single core performance AND ALL THE CORES… Because there is no kill like an Overkill…
Another option is to look into server motherboards that have an iGPU on the motherboard. At least some server motherboards have had a slow GPU on the motherboard itself, so perhaps a 2066 system might work. I’m not up to date on current gen server stuff, so I’m not sure how common that is anymore.
As much as the sound of that temporarily increased my saliva production by about 480%, we’d rather not spend quite that amount of money, hahaha!
Trying to keep this under $1400. And with the 25% sales tax on literally everything here in Norway, that’s becoming a challenge too.
I looked at the Gigabyte cards, and they seemed to have a set of dual 8x, a single 8x or 4x, and then two 1x slots, for the most part, but with bifurcation, that should work too, can’t believe I didn’t look into that earlier!
Well, gigabyte does weird things with splitting PCIe lanes on B550. That way they literally give you dual PCIe3.0 x16 bandwidth on two slots. Cause B550 and PCIe 4.0 and all that jazz…
I think Gigabyte are the only ones that does that. I haven’t seen Asrock or Asus or whatever boards splitting bandwidth.
