Hello All,

This is my first post on the vMix forums, so please forgive me if this request should be posted elsewhere. After having reviewed the forums for some time, I decided it was time to ask for the assistance of others for our own use case.

I am tasked with live streaming and recording services for my church. We have been using vMix for the last 7 years or so running at 480p29.97 SD into a Blackmagic Intensity Pro PCIe capture card. We recently got a new camcorder (Canon Vixia HF R800 which does 1080p60 HDMI output) and upgraded our capture card to the Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K PCIe model. After doing a trial setup with streaming through Adobe Flash Media Encoder, recording to MP4, and fullscreen output to our HDMI splitter which feeds two monitors (all set at 1080p29.97), our CPU has hit the limit. Additionally, the GPU is showing it is overloaded in vMix as well. I ran the master framerate in vMix at 59.94p and 29.97p and 29.97 allowed the input to render smoother.

Current PC Specs Are:
Motherboard: Asus M5A97
CPU: AMD FX-4100 Quad Core
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GT 520 1GB
RAM: 8GB (4x2GB) DDR3-1600MHz
Western Digital 1 TB 7200 HDD
PSU: Thermaltake 430W ATX
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

I know these are quite outdated as we built the PC in 2012. We are now looking to put together a system capable of streaming, recording, and displaying output to our in-building monitors with a single 1080p60 input and a few other inputs (text, title, video clip, NDI desktop capture), so a basic single input HD setup. Being a smaller church, our budget is always tight, so we'd like to balance performance and budget, but would like to have a smooth and reliable system with few to no hiccups. I looked at the reference systems and maybe something similar to the Emerald build would work? Would like to stay under $1,000 for sure if possible!

Thanks,

Ryan

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the reply. I went back to our SD setup this morning in order to keep things running smoothly. I kept an eye on the CPU load during the peak workload this morning and with streaming, recording, and fullscreen output the CPU was around 75% on all four cores. If I were to upgrade the GPU, do you think the CPU usage would decrease? I wouldn't be opposed to a CPU upgrade as other tasks can take awhile outside of vMix. I have noticed that Adobe FMLE uses more CPU than vMix does. Our stream is multi bit rate. One at 500 kbps and one at 200 kbps. The streaming and MP4 recording were all at 480p29.97 using the old Blackmagic card. I'm just afraid to spend $400 and the problem might not go away whereas I could put $200 into a CPU and $200 into a card, but I'm certainly no expert here!

Thanks,

Ryan

If you upgrade the graphics card the system can stream using GPU instead of CPU. Same with recording. I work with a 2013 setup, and the graphics card AND the SSD Unit changed my world. Best regards.

The ASUS M5A97 can handle a bit more than an FX-4100. An 8 core FX-8350 would have benchmarks that double the FX-4100, and are $65 at Newegg.

Your results are not bad for your CPU.

Maybe your camera can output 720p? this is approx. the same bandwith as 1080i, half of 1080p and you stream 720p anyway.
If you cannot change your source to interlaced, you have to improve the CPU.
With an upgraded FX-8350 CPU you are comming closer to the old I7 CPU we use. I think this is worth a try.
And did you also changed your Harddrive to SSD? at the moment you are far away from the mentioned "under 1000$" budget.
still enough to change to a i7 mainboard and change the ssd.

Well, they had one listed at that price when I did a search, but that deal has ended.

On Amazon there are boxed ones for $89.99, CPU only for $66.50, but no fan included (same for CPU only on eBay)

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=amd+f...4&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_6

CPU Benchmarks (from PassMark)

AMD FX-4100 4071

AMD FX-8350 8951

I had a 8350 in my editing computer, but went up to an FX-9590. I use both AMD and Intel processors with vMix.

see PM