Before we begin, there’s some important lingo to understand. All of this will be discussed in much greater detail in section 2.

Streaming: Capturing, encoding, and uploading video and audio information in real time.

Encoding: The process of turning raw video and audio information into a compressed file type that can be understood by software on the other end. (All streaming requires encoding.)

Software encoding: Using software that uses the CPU to perform the encoding. Higher quality, but more demanding on hardware. (Covered in-depth in later sections.)

Hardware encoding: Using software that uses specialized hardware to perform the encoding instead of the CPU. Slightly lower quality, but more efficient for hardware. (Also covered in-depth in later sections.)

Bitrate: The file size we’re creating every second when encoding. If we set our video to record at 1500kbps (kilobits per second), our file size will be 1500 kilobits per second, or 188 kilobytes for every second of video. (8 bits in a byte)

Frames-per-second (FPS): The number of images your computer can produce every second while performing a task, such as gaming. For PC gaming, our target framerate is often 60 FPS. We also use frames-per-second when discussing encoding.

This section presents three example PC builds to represent a range of budgets and needs. Following this section, we explain how to achieve optimal streaming performance with each of these builds.

Budget Streaming Build ($650)

For streaming games such as League of Legends or Dota 2 at 1080p, or more demanding games at 720p and lower graphical settings, using hardware encoding

Solid Streaming Build ($1200)

For streaming most modern games at high settings at 1080p or 720p, using hardware or software encoding.

Hardcore Streaming Build ($1600)

For streaming the most advanced games at ultra settings at 1080p or 1440p, with high quality software encoding

Professional Streamer Build ($2600)

For playing at 4K and streaming at 1080p or even 1440p at the highest quality possible. The most performance you can get, before going off the deep end of the performance / price curve.

Ultimate Streaming Build ($5000)

For streaming the most intensive and demanding games at the absolute highest quality possible

Note: This sub-section is only for people considering streaming using a two-PC setup. You should feel free to skip this section if you plan to use only one PC. If you're on a tight budget, it makes more sense to game and stream from one PC, and get a faster GPU and CPU.

The vast majority of streamers are going to use one PC to stream, getting the best results possible on one PC by using the hardware encoding techniques described in this guide. Using one PC for streaming and gaming is perfectly acceptable.

However, some professional streamers go the extra mile and dedicate an entire second PC to encoding and streaming, while their main gaming PC runs the game without the process of streaming costing any potential performance. If done properly, this ensures even greater performance, though many gamers may consider it extreme.

PC #1: Your Gaming PC

You can build this PC just as you would build any gaming PC. Follow one of our example builds above, or consult our various gaming PC builds on our homepage. The nice thing is that you won’t need any extra power in your gaming PC for this setup. Simply build a PC suitable for playing the game you want to play, at your desired settings.

Note: In our Example Build section, we strongly recommend the combination of Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs because of their superior support for hardware encoding. With the two-PC setup, you do not need to worry about encoding on your gaming PC, so you are free to choose any hardware you would like. Feel free to go with an AMD CPU, GPU, or both, if you plan to use a second PC for streaming.

PC #2: Dedicated Streaming PC

Because this PC’s job is to encode and stream your video feed, it is going to be much different from your average gaming PC. This is where you have the opportunity to make use of the higher quality software encoding by dedicating an entire CPU to the streaming process.

There are three things to highlight about this PC:

• No Graphics Card: This PC does not need a lot of graphical power. As a matter of fact, you could easily get by without a graphics card and simply choose a CPU with an integrated graphics processor. As long as you don’t plan to use this as a secondary gaming rig, you just need graphical power to output to a monitor.
• Less Power: Compared to your gaming PC, your streaming PC does not need to be very powerful. You can get away with 4GB of RAM, a mechanical hard drive, and a low-end motherboard. There’s no need to go crazy with this PC. The rough requirement for streaming at 60fps 4500kbp/s (Twitch’s current maximum settings) will require an AMD FX-4300 or better. However, we will be recommending a low-end i5 to absolutely guarantee a smooth experience.
• Capture Card: You will need a way to record information from your gaming PC. For the most part, motherboards do not have video input devices on them. To solve this, you will need a capture card, preferably with HDMI and HD support. We have a few recommendations below.

You will also need a monitor for your streaming PC. Again you can compromise on quality here, as it doesn’t need to be an incredibly responsive monitor or one with superb contrast.

How it works

Ever used the ‘Mirror Display’ option in Windows when you have two monitors plugged into the same computer? It’s the same principle; your graphics card is going to output the same data to your capture card as it is to your primary gaming monitor. This is why HDMI is a great choice for connecting your computer up to your capture card. You can transmit the audio data with the video data to the capture card.

Please consult our newly somewhat professional diagram:

 

The Gaming PC plays the game and outputs to the monitor (so that you can see the game) and a capture card. The Streaming PC takes the footage from the capture card and uploads to Twitch, as well as outputting to the Streaming PC’s monitor.

To get audio through both your HDMI cable and 3.5mm jacks simultaneously, you have two options.

1. A virtual cable using software such as Audio Repeater ($38).

2. If your capture cards comes with a 3.5mm jack in, you can buy a hardware audio splitter, such as the $3 Belkin 3.5mm Headphone Splitter.

Yes, the audio splitter really is that simple. You’ll need a male to male 3.5mm cable to connect it (a cable with a 3.5mm pin on each end).

Example Dedicated Streaming PC - Micro ATX ($500)

Capture cards

You may be tempted to go for lower quality options, but as mentioned above they may give you significantly worse quality encode, making your second PC serve very little purpose. It’s better to go for a reputable brand for a capture card, as the software required to run the capture card may also be sub-par and may be prone to crashing.

Two popular brands are AverMedia and Elgato, and there's also Blackmagic for a more extreme option. Please note when choosing your capture card that portable capture cards may produce a lower quality because they are limited by USB bandwidth, and require a USB 3.0 port or better.

Why use two PCs if you can use one?

If you play an incredibly CPU-intensive game, even a 5-10% CPU performance hit from hardware encoding can make a difference. Games such as StarCraft II and ARMA 3 bleed your system for resources, to the point that you might opt for the more complicated method to reduce system load. If you really hurl money at this option, you can also get superior quality with the software encoding, but that often requires the expensive, high-end capture cards.

With many of the lower-end capture cards, you will end up with worse quality than streaming straight from your gaming machine. Keep this in mind before you commit your money to this option. Many lower-end capture cards have digital encoders built into them, and they’re usually lower quality components that encode at a lower quality as a result. Your CPU then encodes that already-lower-quality encode again to stream it to Twitch.

While you can put one of these capture cards into your gaming PC, there is absolutely no point. You’ll get similar or better quality streaming directly from your gaming PC with hardware encoding.

Delay

When using a capture card, you will have a delay. It’s almost completely unavoidable. To measure the delay, get a preview up of your gaming PC on your streaming PC (you can do this with OBS by selecting ‘Show Preview’). Start a stopwatch or timer on your gaming PC, and stop it when the timer appears on your streaming PC. The difference between the two times is your delay.

Now that we’ve seen some builds, let’s figure out how to make the most of our hardware. This section will cover every aspect of streaming, particularly the difference between software encoding (CPU-based, more intensive) and hardware encoding (GPU-based, less intensive).

Selecting the right hardware

Unlike recording videos for YouTube, streaming is done on the fly. There’s no editing or tweaking, and no separate upload procedure. It’s straight from your computer to the internet. This requires an extra powerful computer to avoid any skipping and maintain smooth visual quality.

As a result, it’s important to have the right hardware for streaming, and you can get much more performance out of that hardware if you know what you’re doing with it.

When you record a video to upload to a website such as YouTube, you capture the video and sound information as it’s made and store it onto your hard drive. You can then edit these files later with software such as Adobe Premiere, with which you can encode your video at a leisurely pace, and then upload it to the internet whenever you’re ready. It’s a multi-step process that does not require your PC to perform multiple tasks at once.

With streaming, you have to do all of the above in real time. You capture the video and audio information, and then turn it into a video that can be broadcast, all at once. Asking a computer to do all of this in real time is more complicated.

If your PC can’t perform the task efficiently in real time, your computer will start skipping information to catch up with itself. This causes jerkiness, poor video quality, pixelation, and any other number of problems for your viewers. Having the right hardware is key to your success.

 

What is encoding?

Encoding is the process of compressing the large “raw” video and audio files into smaller files using advanced mathematical algorithms.

When you play an MP3 on your computer, you’re playing back an encoded sound file. Your computer has software and hardware that understands how to read the MP3 file and turn it back into sound. The same is true for video files.

Raw video and audio information is huge, often taking several megabytes per second to record. Without compressing these files with encoding, it would be incredibly difficult to upload them in real time.

The ideal outcome of encoding is to produce the smallest file possible, while sacrificing the least amount of quality in the sound and video.

There are “lossless” compression types that don’t remove any information from video, and just store the information more efficiently. We also have “lossy” compression types that remove some data, or blur parts of data together, like big areas of the same color in JPEG image files.

The less information we lose, the better. We usually accept a compromise and sacrifice a little bit of quality to substantially decrease the file size and therefore make streaming manageable.

Your computer needs to determine which bits of information should be kept, and which bits aren’t very important. We have some very sophisticated encoding techniques to determine which bits of information are the ones we really need, but the more sophisticated these operations become, the more hardware they require to work. This can mean needing a more powerful processor, or a graphics card with special hardware dedicated to encoding.

 

How do you encode?

If you’re live streaming, you’re likely going to be using screen-capture recording/streaming software such as Open Broadcasting Software or XSplit. This software facilitates the encoding and uploading of your gameplay to the internet in real time.

There are two common methods of encoding:

1. Software encoding: Uses the standard parts of your CPU to encode. It is easy, because it can run on any CPU, but is slow because it requires a lot of CPU power.

2. Hardware encoding: Still requires software, but also uses special hardware found in certain CPUs or graphics cards. More efficient on the hardware, but slightly inferior video quality.

Your CPU is a really good all-purpose calculator. It has the instructions to do a lot of different tasks, and it knows how to do them very accurately, but it’s not always the best component for the job.

Hardware encoding makes use of specialized hardware that can’t do all the cool things your CPU can, but it knows how to encode video information faster.

Because hardware encoding is using fixed hardware tuned for speed, the quality is generally a little worse than software encoding, which focuses on doing things as accurately as possible. Ten years ago, this would have made for a big difference in quality. However, hardware encoding has improved enormously since then. For live streaming, it’s unlikely to make a noticeable difference.

Not all hardware encoding solutions are the same, as they make use of different methods. This means the device you use to perform hardware encoding can affect the quality, too. By comparison, CPUs will use very similar instructions and produce video of a very similar quality across the board.

 

Software encoding vs. Hardware encoding

While a little dated, this Anandtech Sandy Bridge CPU review illustrates the quality differences between a software encoder and a hardware encoder:

Drag the cursor to compare the image encoded with software encoding vs. hardware encoding.

The image on the left was encoded using software encoding with an i5-2500K CPU. The CPU has tried to include as much detail as possible. The movie was encoded using 1.5Mbps at 640x480, achieving 128 FPS on average.

The image on the right was encoded using the integrated graphics processor (iGPU) of the i5-2500K, making use of hardware encoders. It’s a little blurrier, but the on-board graphics processor managed to encode this at 264 FPS on average—double that of the CPU.

Yes, it bears repeating: Both videos were encoding using the i5-2500K, but one was encoded on the CPU side (software encoding) and one was encoded with the integrated graphics processor (hardware encoding).

Many modern graphics processors have software available to make use of them as hardware encoders. The Intel HD Graphics chips inside many of Intel’s CPUs can be used as hardware encoders, thanks to Intel’s software, QuickSync.

 

Hardware encoding: Higher efficiency, better performance

No, you do not need to use hardware encoding in order to stream from your PC. However, as mentioned before, processing all of that information in real time is a complicated task. Hardware encoding is much faster and more efficient.

If you want to stream a game at 30 FPS with 1080p resolution at a decent level of quality, you would need to dedicate an entire core of an Intel CPU running at 3 GHz or higher. If you’re using a dual core CPU, that’s 50 percent of your CPU. With a quad core, it’s still 25 percent of your CPU.

That’s a lot of your CPU. For many modern games, taking away half or a quarter of your CPU for encoding could mean a big loss in frame rate for actually playing the game.

That’s not to say hardware encoding doesn’t use any of your CPU. It does, but it uses much less. Where you’d be looking at 25 percent of your quad core Intel CPU for software encoding, you’d be looking at more like 5 percent of your CPU when hardware encoding.

 

Choosing your components

Now that we know a bit more about encoding, here are some brief descriptions of how each type of component relates to the process of streaming:

CPU (very important): Not only does your CPU have a hand in playing the game, it also has to work to stream your content. We can reduce the workload on the CPU tremendously with tools like hardware encoding, and we do this because the CPU is so important.

Graphics Card (very important): The importance of your graphics card depends on the type of games you want to stream. You’ll need one to play most games, but you probably don’t need one to stream pixel-art indie games, for example. That said, we recommend graphics cards for almost any desktop PC. Keep in mind that different graphics cards have different hardware encoding options. NVIDIA currently has more hardware encoding options than AMD.

Storage (high importance): If you want to record your gameplay, fast storage will let you do so easily without worrying about slowdowns. If you have the option for multiple storage drives, our recommendation would be to use an SSD for your operating system and games, and recording to a conventional hard drive.

RAM (medium importance): RAM is important because we’re adding an extra task to our gaming: the encoding. Modern PC games are huge. With this increase in size, we generally need more RAM to run newer games. Having extra RAM can help to avoid any frame rate drops where you normally run out.

Motherboard and PSU (medium importance): Neither component is central to the streaming process, but a bad motherboard or a bad power supply can destroy other parts if they fail. It’s a no-brainer to buy quality parts when they play such a critical role in the stability of your machine.

Heat Sink/Cooling solutions (medium importance): For the most part, this depends on what machine you’re using. Most modern Intel processors aren’t tiny silicon fireballs, and most AMD processors ship with a high quality heat sink. As long as your computer doesn’t overheat, this won’t be an enormous issue for you. If it does overheat, you’ll start experiencing throttling and dropped frames. Give your PC a stress test before streaming if you’re worried about overheating.

 

Selecting hardware for encoding

Some hardware options work better for certain budgets. As you saw in the Example Builds section above, we catered each build to a specific encoding solution that worked best for that budget.

Intel Integrated Graphics Processor: Most Intel CPUs have a small integrated GPU built in. In fact, in the newer CPUs this GPU takes up almost 50% of the physical size of your CPU. Examples of this are Intel HD 3000, 4000, 4600, and 6000.

Please note that many Xeon processors and ‘Enthusiast CPUs’ (such as the i7-7820X) do not have an integrated graphics processor.

NVIDIA graphics processor: NVIDIA have special hardware for encoding video in their GPUs. This is only present on GPUs from the GTX 600 line and above. The feature is listed by NVIDIA as “ShadowPlay.”

AMD graphics processor: AMD graphics processors are able to encode video, but they are not well supported by streaming software at this time. While it is possible, it is not recommended to rely on this due to a lack of support. For example, AMD’s hardware encoding solution is not present in Open Broadcasting Software (OBS), which is probably the most popular streaming software available.

To recap, here are your options for encoding, depending on which hardware combination you choose:

As you can see, the combination of an Intel CPU with an NVIDIA GPU provides the greatest variety of streaming options.

 

How to activate hardware encoding

Intel QuickSync: QuickSync is activated in your computer’s BIOS or UEFI screen. To reach this screen, restart your computer, and while it’s booting hold the options screen key, which varies depending on your motherboard manufacturer. It’s usually F2, F11, or F12. Check your motherboard manual to find out.

Once you’ve entered the BIOS or UEFI, you’ll have to look through the menus to find the Quicksync option. It’s usually under “Advanced Settings,” and it’s usually called “Intel IGP.” Make sure it’s turned on, and then if the option is available, assign the IGP either 128MB or 256MB of RAM.

You’ll then need to connect a monitor to the IGP. This can be done with either a physical monitor, or a virtual monitor. If you choose a virtual monitor, open up your Windows screen resolution settings panel, click “Detect,” change the dropdown to Intel HD Graphics, and and select “Try to connect anyway.” Drag this monitor up and to the corner of your other monitors, so that your mouse can’t accidentally go onto that virtual screen.

Remember, if your physical monitor has more than one input (VGA and DVI), you can use one monitor with two cables connected. Just drag it up and to the side in the resolution settings so that your mouse can’t accidentally move onto an unusable area.

NVIDIA’s ShadowPlay: This is automatically installed if you have a GeForce GTX 600 series or newer graphics card with updated drivers. Just select NVENC in your Open Broadcasting Software settings (or equivalent streaming program).

AMD’s VCE: Similar to ShadowPlay, you don’t need to do anything extra—just select the VCE encoding option if available in your preferred streaming program (not available under OBS).

 

Upload Speed: What internet upload speed do you need to stream?

Your internet upload speed will set a hard cap for the resolution and level of quality at which you’re able to stream. You want to make sure your streaming bitrate doesn’t exceed your upload speed’s capabilities. (Bitrate is adjusted in the settings of your streaming software.)

First, you can use a speed test to find out your upload speed. We recommend Ookla’s speedtest. After testing your speed, you can use the auto-configuration wizard within OBS Studio to get settings recommendations.

A good rule of thumb is to set your bitrate a little below your upload speed. For example, if your upload speed is 3.0 mpbs (megabits per second), you could set your bitrate to something just below 3000 kbps, such as 2600-2800. (1 mbps = 1000 kbps)

As a general rule of thumb, here are the minimum upload speeds needed for some common streaming resolutions:

1080p: 3.5 mbps

720p: 2.5 mbps

480p: 1.2 mbps

If your upload speed seems to be bottlenecking your stream, try lowering either your resolution or your bitrate.

 

What about capture cards?

A capture card takes information from an outside source and turns it into video that can be sent to the computer connected to it. While this is a form of encoding, it’s more of a bridge between two devices that couldn’t otherwise communicate.

This means that capture cards aren’t particularly useful for recording a game being played on the same device you’re using to broadcast. They are, however, required to stream footage from video game consoles.

If you use a capture card to take footage from your Xbox or Playstation, you still need to encode it again using your computer to broadcast it to Twitch or other services. Luckily, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have a digital video recorder built into the console. This allows you to stream your video games online without the hassle of a capture card and a computer at hand.

But this article is about streaming on PC, so let’s move on.

How did streaming work before all this fancy hardware encoding?

Like streaming a video game console, people used to stream PC games using two computers. One computer would be dedicated to playing the game, while the other would be equipped with a capture card and would run the streaming software. Back in those days, the encoders weren’t nearly as sophisticated, and required more of the system to run in the first place. It wasn’t uncommon to dedicate an entire Core2Duo CPU to the task of streaming.

No PC is complete without peripherals, and a streaming PC requires several additional peripherals. Let’s review.

Webcams

Many people like to use a webcam while streaming in order to appear on screen for their viewers. There are a huge variety of webcams out there that will suitably get the job done.

Note: Some webcams may require tuning to optimize for streaming. Xsplit has a guide for tuning webcams to work better with streaming software.

Here are four of our favorites (plus a related option), in order of price:

Microphones

If you want to speak to your viewers, you’ll need a microphone. There’s an enormous variety of microphones out there. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll stick to microphones that don’t require an XLR interface. However, if you want an even more impressive (read: expensive) setup, an XLR microphone is something you can explore.

Monitors

Most streamers use at least two monitors: One for the game, and another for streaming tools such as community chat. If you need to upgrade your monitors, or buy an additional screen for extra streaming functionality, you can see our top recommendations over on our monitor page.

Keyboards and Mice

Not just any keyboard and mouse will be suitable for your glorious new streaming machine. Head over to our keyboard or mouse pages for our top recommendations. (OK, technically, any functional keyboard and mouse will do, but haven’t you earned an upgrade?)

While not strictly necessary, especially for beginners, paying some extra attention to your lighting and your background can lend a really professional look and feel to your stream.

Lighting

Lighting is seen by some as a mystical art, but when it comes to a simple set-up, there honestly isn't a whole lot to it. At a basic level, we use lighting to highlight things for the camera, be that foreground or background details, or people in the scene. Now, naturally, for video conferencing and virtual meetings, we are after a set-up that best highlights you.

So, let's look at how we can do that!

 

The Backlight

If you haven't got a whole lot of money to spend on lighting set-ups with stands and so on, getting a backlight can be the cheapest solution to get a different look. This light is what it sounds like: it is a light placed behind you. The aim here is to take advantage of how the camera sees light to increase the separation of you from your background.

With entry-level webcams, this can be crucial to ensure you aren't getting lost in the image of your room or office background (especially if you have darker hair!), so that you stay the main highlight on your stream!

 

Entry Level: GLORIOUS-LITE 50W LED Work Light ($30)

There are loads of variations on these lights, mainly due to them being used (as the name suggests) as work lights for lighting small work areas, be that indoors or outdoors. There's not a whole lot to the set-up here, just set this up as far behind you as you can, and angle it upwards to highlight your back.

Do note that this 50W variant is reasonably strong light for indoor use, so if you are in a small space (with perhaps only 1m of clearance behind you), then go for the 30W version.

 

Upgrade: SANSI 50W RGB LED Flood Light ($50)

A simple upgrade to the above, this adjustable RGB flood light provides the same level of light intensity with the addition of a controller and color adjustment. Altogether, this a no-brainer upgrade for someone looking for a solid choice for a only little more price.

After this point, you're basically going to be looking for a complete lighting kit, listed below!

 

The Key Light

Traditionally, this is the first light you would go for when it comes to video and photography. To get a good key light tends to cost a little bit more.

This is mainly because it is pretty much required that it is an adjustable light, and that it can be set-up on some sort of stand so that it is at the same height as your head (regardless of whether you're standing or sitting on a chair).

Like the backlight, you can get variations on a key light which are designed to give your face good illumination and nothing else, but these can often look flat and will mean that the light is directly in front of you, making it harder to see what is on a screen too.

 

Entry Level: Desk Ring Light with Swivel Clamp Arm ($34)

The cheapest standalone set-ups are ring lights like this one, which comes with a simple adjustable desk clamp so you can move the light to suit your set-up.

It's well worth taking the time to get this set-up right. To save your eyes, I know a lot of folks who will just mount the light higher and have it shining down on your face; however, do note that the higher you have the light placed, the more shadows it will produce! So, have your camera active when you're moving it so you can see what impact this has on the end result.

 

Cheap Alternative: SIMAWAN Ultra Mini Bright LED Video Light ($10)

This is an inexpensive option if you are using a camera with a hotshoe. It's just a simple attachable LED light. This is much cheaper than anything else for this role, mainly because it's super-small, super-simple, and assumes that you already have your camera set-up nailed down and simply want a direct light source to finish things off! This is still adjustable to some degree, so have your camera on so that you can change the brightness to give you a nice even light without blinding yourself!

Anything over these options starts to get into combination kits, so let's move onto those!

 

Key and Fill Lights

What can often happen with just a key light is you get really flat-looking color on your face if its directly in front of you (like the examples above). Now, this isn't the worst thing in the world, as most entry-level webcam set-ups won't benefit from anything more than this anyway.

However, if you're wanting a little more serious lighting set-up, we have to use proper lighting techniques, which means lighting you from at least 2 sources. Here, you will still have the key light source, and to counter that light you have a fill light. These are placed at 90 degrees to you, as this example image shows:

The best way to do this is to set up the key light first, to give you a reasonable level of brightness (remember not to go too strong here, to prevent making your skin look awful) then turn on and adjust your fill light so that you have a nice even-looking brightness.

Remember, we're not going for a moody cinematic lighting effect here, so if you end up having different levels of light on your face, it could very easily look awful. Please be careful.

As you can see from the example image, balancing the lights should give you an even shadow directly behind you. If you are finding from the video you have a shadow to the left or right of you, that means the light opposite is either too bright or that side light is too weak. So adjust things to get it right!

 

Entry Level: Neewer Dimmable 5600K USB LED Video Light with Adjustable Tripod Stand ($50)

This kit from Neewer isn't anything super-fancy, yet for the vast majority of you it will be more than sufficient. These go up to a little over 1m in height, and they are designed to sit on a desk or be on the floor while giving you that simple 2-point lighting set-up we explained above.

 

Upgrade: Neewer Super Slim LED Video Light with Light Stand ($90)

Designed to be a literal upgrade to the first pack, this kit uses floor-standing lights and is an upgrade in every way. It lets you adjust the temperature and intensity of the lights, and offers the option to run them off the included batteries. That last feature makes this kit a superb choice if you want to pack the lights away again after each use.

 

Full 3-point Lighting Set-up

This combines your Key, Fill, and Back light to provide an excellent all-around lighting solution for a very professional-looking stream.

The general aim here is to have a more complete balanced set-up, so this is where you tend to find more studio-ready kits available.

 

Standard Kit: MOUNTDOG Photography Studio Softbox Lighting Kit ($100)

Don't feel freaked out by the softboxes! These will give you a less harsh light when compared to the LEDs by themselves, so they are often desirable when it comes to a studio set-up. It is worth noting here that you will need to have the space to set these up. So be sure to double-check those dimensions.

Now, we could recommend an upgraded pack here, but this is already a very serious professional arrangement and the prices climb rapidly from this point, so we figure at this point it's better to focus on our next suggestion instead: backdrops.

Backdrops

Most will recognise these as green screens or blue screens behind someone, which allow both video conferencing and streaming software to key out the colour and replace the background with whatever you want.

Some of you might have noticed that certain software attempts to do this without a greenscreen, instead relying on the camera focus to know what parts of the background to cut out. The results aren't great there, as a lot of the time the software struggles to separate you from the background due to poor lighting. Which is why we focused on lighting first!

This isn't a requirement to get your set-up looking "nice", yet it can make the difference if you're wanting a professional set-up that lets you fully control what is shown behind you in a very clean way.

Note: moreso than before, when using keying techniques, it is important to have any shadows be directly behind you. Any soft shadows off to your side can affect what the greenscreen looks like to the camera, and can lower the quality of the keying out.

 

Standard Kit: Neewer Photo Studio Backdrop with Stand ($75)

This comes with everything you need to have the screen set up behind you. You need the floor run-off so that you are not casting shadows onto the screen itself, all while being able to key out that space if also needed.

The way this is mounted should allow the screen to use its own weight to remove any creases from transit, however with these fabrics you can often steam iron (NOT a standard iron) to remove them from the back of it once it's mounted. Never do it on the front surface.

Now, the observant amongst you might have noticed that this kit comes with a black-and-white backdrop too. These are generally if you want a simple background colour, and although they are mostly used for photography, a number of video users often go for the simple white background to just give a clean look on their uploads.

 

Combined Lighting and Backdrop Kits

Some of you might have noticed how a lot of these kits can be used together—and the manufacturers of these products have noticed that too!  

Standard Kit: Neewer Studio Kit ($170)

What you have here is a full set of lights for both the 3-point lighting set-up and a light for illuminating the backdrop, in addition to the whole set for mounting the lights and backdrop.

Yes, this is an expensive kit, but this is also the largest and most all-encompassing option we would recommend to anyone looking to have a set-up like this inside their home.

Once you've built your streaming dream machine, you might want some help getting your stream set up and optimized. We have published a detailed article on How to Stream PC Games on Twitch. The guide is a step-by-step walkthrough for getting started on Twitch with two different versions of OBS.

Basically, you will transmit your stream to Twitch using OBS (or other broadcast software), and it will play it live through the web browser to everyone visiting your Twitch channel. It's that simple.

By carefully choosing our hardware, we can have higher framerates, better performance, and a smoother stream for the money.

The two best encoding methods for streaming are Intel’s QuickSync and NVIDIA’s ShadowPlay, which are both supported by software such as OBS (Open Broadcasting Software) and XSplit. Having an Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU, or both will give you the most options for high performance streaming.

We’ve talked a lot about the technical details of making your stream as smooth as possible, but most importantly, have fun and enjoy the community!

For more PC build recommendations, check out our complete build guide at logicalincrements.com.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments below, or email us at contact@logicalincrements.com.

Charlie Powers is a contributing writer for Logical Increments.

Chris Cunningham is a contributing writer for Logical Increments.

James Andrews is a content manager for Logical Increments.

Logical Increments helps more than 2 million PC builders each year with hardware recommendations for any budget.

1. Open Broadcasting Software
2. XSplit
3. Anandtech Sandy Bridge CPU Review
4. Ookla's Internet Speed Test
5. OBS Forum members comparing encoder quality
6. Linus Tech Tips Forum encoder quality comparison