But if you need a CPU just for gaming and streaming again, the 5900X is the best buy at the moment. If you need its 24 cores for serious video editing or rendering workloads and have the money to burn, get it, it’s a beast. The Ryzen Threadripper 3960X is a premium workstation CPU with a price to match. Intel Core i9 10850K: Best upper midrange CPU for streaming But if you’re streaming your games, two extra cores found in the 10700KF combined with almost the same price, make the 10700KF much better choice for streaming than the 5600X. The 5600X might be a better choice for gamers who don’t stream. Overall, the 10700KF is an excellent mid-range gaming CPU. The 10700KF is serviceable for video editing and you won’t lose too much time preparing YouTube videos of your streams while being able to use higher OBS presets and get competitive framerates in any game you might stream.
With that said, the AMD part is better at heavy multithreaded workloads, but not by that much. You will get slightly lower framerates, but we think the small performance hit is worth it considering just how much pricier the 5800X is. The 10700KF, surprisingly, can stream at higher quality via OBS than the 5800X without dropping frames. Thanks to its competitive pricing, the 10700KF is a better choice for streaming than both the Ryzen 7 3700X and 5800X. Intel Core i7 10700KF: Best mid-range CPU for streaming Pair it with a budget Z490 board, overclock it, and you will have almost the same performance as you would with the Ryzen 5 5600X, one of the fastest gaming CPUs at the moment, for less money. This is an excellent choice for gamers and streamers at the moment, thanks to its competitive price. At the moment, the 11th gen Core i5 sports a ludicrous price but once its price returns to MSRP levels, it will be a better choice.įinally, if you have some extra cash, think about getting the 10600KF. Finally, once prices stabilize, get the 11400F instead. The CPU could probably manage to output playable framerates and a steady stream when using the medium preset in OBS, but we recommend sticking to the NVENC and enjoying (much) higher framerates since the difference in quality between the two is visible, but not that noticeable for you to sacrifice CPU performance.Īs we already said in the previous section, pair the 10400F with a B560 motherboard and get faster memory (DDR4-3200 with tight latencies, for instance) and you will see a noticeable performance increase compared to using the CPU with a B460 board. Let the GPU do the heavy lifting and your streamer career may commence. 1440p high refresh rate gaming is guaranteed, as long as you have a capable graphics card. The Core i5 10400F is a capable six-core processor that can run any current title at high refresh rates. Intel Core i5 10400F: Best budget CPU for streaming If that’s the case, check out our next recommendation. If you’re a variety streamer and happen to stream AAA titles, you might want to spend more money on a six-core CPU. The newer chipset allows memory overclocking, which can give you a nice performance boost while gaming and streaming. If you decide to get the i3 we also recommend getting a budget B560 motherboard instead of a B460 board. You can, in theory, use faster (superfast, very fast) OBS presets, but the image quality will look like you’ve recorded the game with a 90’s camcorder.
Remember, this CPU isn’t suited for software encoding. So, if you’re on a tight budget get the i3, pair it with any Turing-based Nvidia GPU or newer, and you’ve got yourself an excellent starting setup for streaming esports titles. The Ryzen 3 3300X is a great CPU and it outperforms the 10100F but its current price is ridiculous. The Core i3 10100F is, at the moment, the best entry-level CPU for gaming and streaming. Instead of using the fast or very fast preset and getting subpar image quality, you can use NVENC and get both solid image quality and great CPU and GPU performance. Thus, we recommend these two only if you combine them with Nvidia Turing GPUs that will do the heavy lifting. The i3 10100F and i5 10400F are great for playing games but not great for streaming them.