Once you’ve assembled your hardware, including your gaming PC and streaming PC, you’ll need to start rounding up software - including streaming software. If you're considering buying a machine strictly to handle encoding video for your stream, Intel has partnered up with a few manufacturers to offer personal streaming computers optimized for streaming out of the box. When selecting your streaming PC, keep in mind that your CPU does most of the work encoding video for your stream. For your primary gaming PC, you’ll want to make sure you have at least the minimum CPU and GPU specs to play the games you want. Whether you decide to repurpose an older machine or purchase an entirely new one for the job, make sure you have a mouse, keyboard, and monitor for both.Ī good rule of thumb is to think of one PC as your gaming computer, and the other as your streaming machine. Depending on your specific streaming needs and hardware, your setup process might look slightly different, though the fundamentals should be roughly the same.
There isn’t one exact way to set up your ideal streaming solution, so we’ll be going over a variety of hardware configurations here.