RAZER RIPSAW
Game capture the easy way
BOY, OH BOY, do we love streaming here in the MaximumPC office! Or, to be more precise, we love watching it. Not a day goes by without one of us casually watching the odd Hearthstone or Magic:TheGathering stream on Twitch, whether that’s during lunch, or even sneakily during the day, while responding to emails. It’s a passion, a hobby, and it’s growing at a phenomenal rate. And as more and more of us tune in to watch our favorite live-streamers, it’s only right that the number of live-streamers increases as well, right?
The thing is, it’s never been an easy feat to get up and running. For those looking to get into streaming, until now it’s always been an arduously complex setup process. You need the right system, preferably with a Core i7, an appropriate GPU, peripherals galore, and, of course, enough bandwidth to catapult those 1.8 million pixels you’re pumping out every second into the stratosphere and down into your viewers’ machines. That’s not even taking into account the software side of things, such as OBS and XSplit. WE ALL HAVE A VOICE It doesn’t need to be that complicated. Each of us has a voice, and each of us wants to be heard—that’s the conclusion Razer has reached, at any rate. Which is why, after two years of development, we have the Razer Ripsaw. It’s by no means the first capture device to hit the shelves, but it’s one of the few that’s targeted at providing a solution for the gamer who wants to record from anything to everything. Fancy streaming from your old GameCube or N64? You can do that (there’s a component adaptor included). How about from your PC to another PC? Sure thing.
Now, we know many of you will be sitting there thinking, “What’s the point? I already have a powerful enough PC to do that.” Well, yes, that might be the case, but the beauty of the Ripsaw is that you can plug and play straight from one rig into another. You leave the idle system to render and stream the footage (or locally record it, whatever’s your jam), and then have access to the entirety of your main rig’s processing power solely for gaming. Think of it as what ShadowPlay originally did for GeForce, but far more advanced.
Setup is a fairly painless process. You simply plug an HDMI cable from your gaming system’s graphics card into the Ripsaw, then a secondary (included) HDMI cable from the Ripsaw to your monitor. A USB cable goes from the Ripsaw to your streaming system, and job done. There are some fancy mixing features you can utilize at the front of the Ripsaw, but that’s about it. Then it’s just a case of downloading and installing Synapse on your streaming system, and you’re good to go to use it as a video capture card.
During our time testing it, we found the Ripsaw was wonderfully consistent. The local recordings were crisp and sharp— 60fps was a doddle. Fortunately for us, our gaming system comprised an Intel Core i54670K and a GTX 970, while the streaming system held at its heart a Core i7-6700K and 32GB of DDR4. Admittedly, that’s probably not your average use scenario here, but even an Intel Core i3 should be more than capable of streaming 1080p at 60fps, bandwidth permitting of course.
Ultimately, using the Ripsaw makes for a surprisingly enjoyable experience. There were limitations in use, but they were mostly due to Twitch’s delays. Being stuck having to use HDMI wasn’t ideal, and having access to higher resolutions would also have been nice (1080p is your limit). While 1440p or 4K isn’t easily accessible for the majority, having the option would have been a great way of future-proofing the Ripsaw. –ZAK STOREY