**Optimizing Game Streaming on Intel's Core i7 8700 K: Top Five Tips**

Game streaming has become increasingly popular, and with the right optimization techniques, you can enjoy seamless performance and high-quality visuals. In this article, we'll delve into five expert tips to help you maximize your Intel Core i7 8700 K processor for game streaming.

**Tip Number One: Processor Affinity Management**

To get the most out of your 8th gen processor's six core, 12-threaded beast, it's essential to manage processor affinity. By default, many games and streamers are limited to using all available CPU threads. However, this can lead to decreased performance due to increased resource utilization. To combat this, head to the details tab in your game settings and change processor affinity. This will allow you to specify which CPU threads your process is utilizing, giving you more control over performance. For most games like Overwatch, limiting the affinity to six or eight threads has proven to be effective, even at high frame rates.

By limiting the affinity, you'll not only reduce the load on your CPU but also improve overall system stability and prevent thermal throttling. This tip is especially crucial for gamers who want to maintain a balance between performance and power consumption. By leveraging processor affinity management, you can enjoy smoother gameplay and fewer interruptions during live streaming sessions.

**Tip Number Two: Resolution Choice**

When it comes to choosing the right resolution for game streaming, many people default to 1080p, but I generally recommend against this approach. Recording at 1080p and streaming at 720p may seem like a good compromise, but it can lead to lower quality streams and reduced viewership. Instead, consider recording at 1440p (1920x1080) or 1600p (2560x1440), which will provide better image quality while maintaining lower bitrate requirements.

By choosing the right resolution for your needs, you'll not only improve the overall appearance of your streams but also reduce the amount of bandwidth required. This is particularly important for streamers who want to maintain a consistent streaming quality without sacrificing performance or uploading large files.

**Tip Number Three: Encoding Quality**

To take your game streaming to the next level, it's essential to prioritize encoding quality. Most people assume that 1080p is a good starting point for streams, but I recommend experimenting with different resolutions and encoding settings to find the sweet spot for your specific setup.

One effective approach is to use a lower bitrate while maintaining a higher resolution. For example, recording at 1440p (1920x1080) and streaming at 720p can provide a better balance between quality and performance. By leveraging this technique, you'll be able to achieve higher-quality streams without sacrificing too much performance.

**Tip Number Four: Constant Bitrate (CBR)**

For most game streamers, using Variable Bitrate (VBR) encoding is not the best option. Instead, I recommend using Constant Bitrate (CBR), which ensures that your stream maintains a consistent bitrate throughout the entire session. This approach may seem counterintuitive, but it provides several benefits, including reduced CPU utilization and improved system performance.

By leveraging CBR, you'll be able to maintain a stable stream quality without sacrificing too much performance. Additionally, this approach makes it easier for streaming platforms to handle your streams, reducing the likelihood of errors or dropped frames.

**Tip Number Five: Leveraging Hardware and Coding**

Finally, if you're planning to record high-quality gameplay footage while live streaming, I recommend leveraging hardware and coding techniques to achieve seamless results. By utilizing your graphics card for recording purposes, you'll be able to capture higher-quality video without sacrificing performance.

One popular solution is Intel's Vinc encoder, which allows users to record at very high resolutions (up to 4K) without experiencing any performance issues. This technique requires minimal setup and can provide exceptional results, making it a must-try for serious gamers and streamers who want to take their streaming quality to the next level.

**Conclusion**

By following these five expert tips, you'll be well on your way to optimizing your Intel Core i7 8700 K processor for game streaming. From managing processor affinity to leveraging hardware and coding techniques, these tips will help you achieve seamless performance, high-quality visuals, and reduced CPU utilization. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, these tips are sure to improve your gaming experience and take your streams to the next level.

**Additional Resources**

For those interested in learning more about game streaming optimization, I recommend checking out my free OBS master class available on YouTube. In this comprehensive tutorial, we'll dive deeper into the world of stream management, exploring topics such as bitrate calculations, encoder settings, and processor affinity management. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your gaming experience to new heights!

**Support Our Content**

To keep producing high-quality content for our community, please consider supporting us through our fan funding options or by becoming a Twitch subscriber. Your contributions will help us continue creating informative guides, expert tips, and exclusive content that will benefit you as a gamer and streamer.

Thanks for reading, and we'll see you in the next article!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enas I covered in my last video on the subject Intel's Core i7 8700 K 8th gen processor has more cores for you to be able to kick a lot of but when it comes to gaming streaming mega tasking and the like all at once and I've discovered some pretty neat things I can do on this processor for streaming and for background processes and such that I haven't normally been able to do on other hardware that I've tested so in this Intel sponsored tutorial I'm giving you my top 5 tips for optimizing your game stream on the Intel Core i7 8700 K stick with me useful tech education and gaming nostalgia that won't put you to sleep get subscribed and turn on notifications so you won't miss the next guide I'm a postbox here to make tech easier and more fun back with another Intel tutorial and in OBS tutorial we will be focusing on using OBS open broadcaster software which is a free streaming program in this video but most of the principles I'll be covering will actually apply to pretty much any streaming program you want to use so we're gonna go ahead and jump right in I don't want to waste too much time first we're gonna talk about CPU usage presets which is a setting that you may have ignored or not known a whole lot about on the x264 encoder this setting allows you to basically control in a sense what the quality or perceived quality of your video is you're probably used to hearing quality being discussed as bitrate higher bitrate equals better but if when you're live streaming you can only go up to a certain high bitrate on Twitch you can only go up to 6 megabits per second for audio and video together which is pretty low so you can actually improve your quality quite a bit there by lowering your CPU usage preset which is basically how long the processor spins encoding your video for live streaming that's a pretty high-level overview of how it works now by default you're probably set to very fast or super fast which allows you to livestream really really really quickly without too much performance hit but you get a lot of blocky artifacting and some weird quality issues whereas with something like the Intel Core i7 8700 K where you now have 6 cores and 12 threads to work with which is plenty for game and plenty for live-streaming you can go in to the Year encoder options and set CPU usage preset down to very or down to faster fast medium I actually got in at one game I got it down to slow although there's kind of diminishing returns once you get past medium so I'd recommend leaving it on medium but faster fast and medium you're gonna start to notice like if we start out the live stream here at superfast you can see all the different artifacting and then we go down too fast looks a little bit better then we go down to medium it looks really really good and if you can get get down too slow as someone pointed out in my live stream in the last video you might even convince someone you're actually just watching a video instead of a live stream it's kind of neat now if you do still need some help in the performances Department to make this happen you can actually open up your task manager and go to the details tab and change processor affinity which is which CPU threads your process is utilizing because on the 8700 K you have 12 of them to work with you can actually tell your game to only use six or eight threads instead of all 12 which will still give it more than enough power to run most games like an overwatch here had no problem handling it actually ran better for whatever reason when I limited its affinity and when I had it used in the whole CPU so I limited overwatch to six to eight threads and then let OBS use all threads for encoding and that meant I had zero performance issues even dropping down to slow while encoding the stream at full 1080p which is kind of neat tip number three relates to which resolution you should be choosing typically a lot of people either default to 1080p which is okay but I generally disagree with the default or they adopt the more common mentality which I have helped to promote myself which is you recorded 1080p and you stream at 720p because of the lower bit rates that you have to stream it and I generally always recommend that unless you can do what we started with which is lowering the CPU usage preset I pretty much never unless you're doing like static very slow barely moving games or desktop streaming I never recommend streaming at 1080p because lower bitrate at lower resolution is going to better than the same bitrate and higher resolution but if you're able to kick it down to medium or slow or something like that where the encoder is producing a much more higher quality video you can stream at full 1080p or maybe one of the more common options is 1440 by 810 or 1600 by 900 or just close enough to 1080p to where you still get readable text nice looking visuals but you also still have a decent looking stream for tip number 4 of course I recommend to stream CBR this may seem obvious to many of you especially since twitch specifically demands CBR but not everyone does it a lot of people want to stream with VBR this of course refers to how the encoder handles the bitrate and you will see the the setting a CBR which is constant bitrate VBR is variable bitrate or constant rate packed or CRF or cqp there's a lot of different options you don't need to know what they all are but for streaming specifically you should always be at CBR which is constant bitrate this makes it a lot easier on your processor and your graphics card and your computer on the whole to live stream a consistent bitrate no matter what doesn't have to fluctuate with the game or anything like that it's just always going at a constant pace which is gonna improve performance a lot and help smooth things out on most streaming platforms lastly tip number five here if you do want to record a while you live stream I recommend you leveraging hardware and coding which means letting your processor run as much as possible for your streaming and for your game and whatever you might have going on in the background but then leveraging your graphics card to record a higher quality recording that way you don't just have the lower quality stream copy to work with if you want to add it up highlights or upload it to YouTube or do something like that you can leverage your graphics card such as Nvidia's in Vinc encoder which allows you to use pretty much no performance hit recording on your graphics card to record super high quality video that you can go way beyond any streaming bitrate to get a nice quality nice little recording here which winds up looking a lot better so let's a rundown on my top five tips for game streaming on Intel's Core i7 8700 K 8th gen processor to get the best performance and quality balanced with some stuff that I've learned that you can really pull off with this six core 12 threaded beast of a processor I've been very impressed there's been some neat stuff you can do and here's how to optimize just on a kind of more higher level overview if you want to get super technical or in-depth with OBS I of course do have an OBS master class available for free up on my youtube channel playlist linked in the description down below hit the like button if you enjoyed the video thanks so much to Intel for sponsoring this tutorial subscribe for more awesome tech content go check out my unboxing of this awesome beastly cyber power rig with the 8700 k inside and I'll see you in the next one this video is sponsored by viewers like you our videos would not be possible without the generosity of those of you who contribute to one of our fan funding options be a donor box twitch subscriptions direct contributions via PayPal or patreon to join our inner circle and get behind-the-scenes looks at videos go to e+ voxcom slash support to learn more and join us on discord at e post voxcom slash discord thanksas I covered in my last video on the subject Intel's Core i7 8700 K 8th gen processor has more cores for you to be able to kick a lot of but when it comes to gaming streaming mega tasking and the like all at once and I've discovered some pretty neat things I can do on this processor for streaming and for background processes and such that I haven't normally been able to do on other hardware that I've tested so in this Intel sponsored tutorial I'm giving you my top 5 tips for optimizing your game stream on the Intel Core i7 8700 K stick with me useful tech education and gaming nostalgia that won't put you to sleep get subscribed and turn on notifications so you won't miss the next guide I'm a postbox here to make tech easier and more fun back with another Intel tutorial and in OBS tutorial we will be focusing on using OBS open broadcaster software which is a free streaming program in this video but most of the principles I'll be covering will actually apply to pretty much any streaming program you want to use so we're gonna go ahead and jump right in I don't want to waste too much time first we're gonna talk about CPU usage presets which is a setting that you may have ignored or not known a whole lot about on the x264 encoder this setting allows you to basically control in a sense what the quality or perceived quality of your video is you're probably used to hearing quality being discussed as bitrate higher bitrate equals better but if when you're live streaming you can only go up to a certain high bitrate on Twitch you can only go up to 6 megabits per second for audio and video together which is pretty low so you can actually improve your quality quite a bit there by lowering your CPU usage preset which is basically how long the processor spins encoding your video for live streaming that's a pretty high-level overview of how it works now by default you're probably set to very fast or super fast which allows you to livestream really really really quickly without too much performance hit but you get a lot of blocky artifacting and some weird quality issues whereas with something like the Intel Core i7 8700 K where you now have 6 cores and 12 threads to work with which is plenty for game and plenty for live-streaming you can go in to the Year encoder options and set CPU usage preset down to very or down to faster fast medium I actually got in at one game I got it down to slow although there's kind of diminishing returns once you get past medium so I'd recommend leaving it on medium but faster fast and medium you're gonna start to notice like if we start out the live stream here at superfast you can see all the different artifacting and then we go down too fast looks a little bit better then we go down to medium it looks really really good and if you can get get down too slow as someone pointed out in my live stream in the last video you might even convince someone you're actually just watching a video instead of a live stream it's kind of neat now if you do still need some help in the performances Department to make this happen you can actually open up your task manager and go to the details tab and change processor affinity which is which CPU threads your process is utilizing because on the 8700 K you have 12 of them to work with you can actually tell your game to only use six or eight threads instead of all 12 which will still give it more than enough power to run most games like an overwatch here had no problem handling it actually ran better for whatever reason when I limited its affinity and when I had it used in the whole CPU so I limited overwatch to six to eight threads and then let OBS use all threads for encoding and that meant I had zero performance issues even dropping down to slow while encoding the stream at full 1080p which is kind of neat tip number three relates to which resolution you should be choosing typically a lot of people either default to 1080p which is okay but I generally disagree with the default or they adopt the more common mentality which I have helped to promote myself which is you recorded 1080p and you stream at 720p because of the lower bit rates that you have to stream it and I generally always recommend that unless you can do what we started with which is lowering the CPU usage preset I pretty much never unless you're doing like static very slow barely moving games or desktop streaming I never recommend streaming at 1080p because lower bitrate at lower resolution is going to better than the same bitrate and higher resolution but if you're able to kick it down to medium or slow or something like that where the encoder is producing a much more higher quality video you can stream at full 1080p or maybe one of the more common options is 1440 by 810 or 1600 by 900 or just close enough to 1080p to where you still get readable text nice looking visuals but you also still have a decent looking stream for tip number 4 of course I recommend to stream CBR this may seem obvious to many of you especially since twitch specifically demands CBR but not everyone does it a lot of people want to stream with VBR this of course refers to how the encoder handles the bitrate and you will see the the setting a CBR which is constant bitrate VBR is variable bitrate or constant rate packed or CRF or cqp there's a lot of different options you don't need to know what they all are but for streaming specifically you should always be at CBR which is constant bitrate this makes it a lot easier on your processor and your graphics card and your computer on the whole to live stream a consistent bitrate no matter what doesn't have to fluctuate with the game or anything like that it's just always going at a constant pace which is gonna improve performance a lot and help smooth things out on most streaming platforms lastly tip number five here if you do want to record a while you live stream I recommend you leveraging hardware and coding which means letting your processor run as much as possible for your streaming and for your game and whatever you might have going on in the background but then leveraging your graphics card to record a higher quality recording that way you don't just have the lower quality stream copy to work with if you want to add it up highlights or upload it to YouTube or do something like that you can leverage your graphics card such as Nvidia's in Vinc encoder which allows you to use pretty much no performance hit recording on your graphics card to record super high quality video that you can go way beyond any streaming bitrate to get a nice quality nice little recording here which winds up looking a lot better so let's a rundown on my top five tips for game streaming on Intel's Core i7 8700 K 8th gen processor to get the best performance and quality balanced with some stuff that I've learned that you can really pull off with this six core 12 threaded beast of a processor I've been very impressed there's been some neat stuff you can do and here's how to optimize just on a kind of more higher level overview if you want to get super technical or in-depth with OBS I of course do have an OBS master class available for free up on my youtube channel playlist linked in the description down below hit the like button if you enjoyed the video thanks so much to Intel for sponsoring this tutorial subscribe for more awesome tech content go check out my unboxing of this awesome beastly cyber power rig with the 8700 k inside and I'll see you in the next one this video is sponsored by viewers like you our videos would not be possible without the generosity of those of you who contribute to one of our fan funding options be a donor box twitch subscriptions direct contributions via PayPal or patreon to join our inner circle and get behind-the-scenes looks at videos go to e+ voxcom slash support to learn more and join us on discord at e post voxcom slash discord thanks\n"