Building a PC is tricky for many reasons, even experienced builders run into issues every so often, this is because a lot can go wrong when building a PC. For example, you forget to plug a wire into the correct socket, or you didn’t insert the RAM correctly.
There are different types of PCs and they’re made for different reasons, you can find PCs that are made for just gaming or PCs that are made for video editing. Usually, you can tell a type of PC by the hardware they’re using, Gaming PCs will specialize in graphical performance for example.
What Are Gaming PCs?
Gaming PCs are types of computers that opt-in for the best graphical performance for a specific game or resolution. For example, you may build a gaming PC that is able to run a specific game at 60FPS at 1440P or 144FPS at 1440P. For gaming PCs, we recommend at least 6 cores for multitasking performance, but gaming PCs are mainly single-core orientated, so you will need to focus more on clock speeds and IPC for the best performance.
Within a gaming PC, you’ll always find a graphics card, this is because games nowadays heavily utilize operations that the graphics card is efficient at handling. Dedicated graphics cards are one of the most important components for a gaming build, integrated graphics do not have the graphics acceleration capabilities as a dedicated GPU.
Also, gaming PCs will usually have fast storage for faster loading times, this is because some games can take minutes to load. You’ll find SSDs and NVME drives running games instead of the traditional slow hard drives. Games such as GTA V will heavily benefit from the faster storage device.
What Are Video Editing PCs?
Video editing PCs are a type of PC that is more orientated to the processor’s power, this is because video editing software is more CPU bound than GPU bound. But, it isn’t unlikely to find a GPU in a video editing PC, because software such as Davinci Resolve heavily leverages the GPUs power.
Depending on the resolution you’re streaming at, the core count is extremely important. For example, if you’re video editing at 4K, then we recommend a high-end 8 core processor with SMT. If you’re video editing at 1080P, then you may be able to get away with a 6 core processor. Video editing PCs can benefit from either Intel or AMD, as long as they have the multi-core performance to back it up.
For video editing, you’ll usually find both SSDs and HDDs for storage, SSDs will be used for the fast loading times, and typically you’ll want them to be a decent size. Hard drives can be used to store any finished projects, hard drives come in much larger sizes than SSDs, and videos edited in high resolutions will take up a lot of space.
What Are Streaming PCs?
A PC geared more towards streaming will have a decent processor capable of handling CPU-intensive software encoding tasks. Software encoders such as the X264 encoder can be quite CPU intensive requiring many CPU cores to run effectively, so you will see many streaming builds featuring 6-8 core processors.
Many users will like to stream the games they’re playing, so they will also feature a dedicated graphics card either from NVIDIA or AMD. So a streaming PC is basically a more capable gaming PC from the processor’s perspective. There are also different types of encoding such as hardware encoding, this is usually GPU intensive instead of GPU intensive.
Dedicated streaming PCs are PCs that are separate from your main build, this means you will have to build a whole different PC to stream. The benefit of a dedicated streaming PC is that you’re able to offload the streaming resources to a separate PC so it doesn’t influence the gameplay. With dedicated streaming PCs, you will require a capture card to send the signal from your main PC to the dedicated streaming machine.
