Playing to an Audience
Game streaming, where you broadcast your gameplay to an audience of fans who may give you money, is an expensive business. You need a gaming PC, to play the games on, and you need a fast and reliable Internet connection, a camera and microphone—because the face and voice of the streamer are as important as what he or she is doing—and some way of capturing the video output of your PC and sending it out to your audience.
Some streamers use two PCs, an elegant solution that doubles your costs and power usage. Far better to run the streaming software on the resources of your HEDT PC that are unused by gaming.
Open Broadcasting Software, one of the most popular solutions, automatically utilizes all available threads. Essentially, it’s doing background video encoding, taking the output from your GPU and compressing it into something that can be sent over the net. You’re given a choice of encoders when you set up your stream, and the “X264” option runs solely on your CPU (there’s also a clever “Quick Sync” option, which for Intel CPUs makes use of the probably unused integrated graphics, but the HEDT variants don’t have them, so it’s not something to discuss here). If you’ve got enough spare cores, you can use the “X264” option to do the encoding with no penalty to your game frame rates. You can even reserve cores to do nothing but encode video through the “Set Core Affinity” option in Task Manager.