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Hardware Review: Avermedia Live Gamer HD C985
Preface
If you’re a budding computer enthusiast searching for hardware to increase the performance of your rig, one of the most difficult things ever is finding a part that will yield tangible performance gains. I don’t know about you, but DAMN I hate reading review after review of vague, nondescript praise about a product. If you’re just now getting into streaming or recording videos for Youtube, you’ll definitely be running into similar problems. What program is the best? Is Xsplit worth buying over something like FMLE or FFsplit? What is the difference between h264 and x264? And for hardware…Is hyperthreading really that great, is it worth the extra money? How much more will it help? Will a better CPU or GPU help me with streaming? Do SSDs even matter? What about RAM speed? If I overclock my CPU, how much will it help? Sure, it’s possible to find the answers to all of these questions, but it requires digging and digging and reading and reading and so much more research than one should ever have to do to find the simple answer to certain questions:
“How much of a performance gain can I expect from a given upgrade?”
A lot of people out there bought a PC with the intention of upgrading it at some point in time. Of course, this is hard when those Intel bastards change their socket type every 2 years, but I digress. A lot of people now are getting into the wonderful world of streaming! A year or two ago, hardly anyone streamed. If you’d venture a look onto teamliquid.net, you’d find maybe 10-15 streamers at any given point in time. If you check today, that number is easily 10 or 20 times greater.
One question people constantly ask me is “What part of my computer should I upgrade to stream better?” Unfortunately, the answer is your CPU. Streaming is entirely CPU dependent and better RAM/SSDs/GPUs will not help you stream better. Unfortunately a CPU upgrade for a lot of people also means a motherboard upgrade, and, consequentially, sometimes a RAM upgrade as well. This translate into way more money + time than a person might want to invest into just picking up streaming as a hobby. And that brings us to….
Review
Avermedia Live Gamer HD C985
I, on principle, absolutely hate these kinds of products. “Plug this device in and it will magically decrease the strain on your computer and increase your system performance!”…yeah, right. As someone who’s been streaming for a long time, I’ve become highly skeptical of products like these. My motto is the typical “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” I searched and searched for any kind of decent benchmarks, but all I could find were these vague statements of praise -
Unbelievably, huh.
Low PC resource consumption???
I searched and searched and I couldn’t find any good reviews. I hate descriptive adjectives; I WANT NUMBERS!
ARG! Let’s start with the product that we have here.
The Avermedia Live Gamer HD C985 is a PCI-insertable card that assists with capturing and encoding. You plug it into a PCI slot, run an HDMI cable from a monitor to the “Out” port on the card, then run an HDMI from your graphics card to the “In” port on the capture card. The card can then be used to capture the image, or you can use it to encode it into an h264 stream. You can only do one at a time, though that’s irrelevant. I won’t go into detailed explanation here, but the h264 hardware encoder on the card is no good for streaming as the bitrate it spits out is far too high. If you’re interested in purchasing this card for streaming, you will be using it for its capture purposes.
The card is capable of up to 1080p@30fps or 720p@60fps. Based on the polling I’ve done, either setting seems to be fine, with a slight preference for the 720@60fps option.
The Laboratory
My rig -
I7-2600k @ 4.4GHz
GTX580 @ 975MHz
Benching software -
Fuck Furmark, and fuck 3dmark. I don’t care about the results for those programs because I don’t play those programs in my free time. I, personally, play Starcraft 2. Starcraft is an incredibly CPU-intensive game, so it should be a good program to get us some decent benchmarks.
3 tests to make sure I have a decent average. I’ll be using FRAPS to give me averaged FPS measurements. I’m going to run a Starcraft 2 replay from 0:00 for 1 minute for every test. All tests will be done using Xsplit doing a local recording. The testing will be done at 1280×720 @ 60fps.
All graphics set to their lowest setting, game is in Fullscreen: Window mode and running at 1920×1080.
Starcraft 2 baseline bench - 334FPS
Streaming with X-split's "Screen Capture" - 203FPS
Streaming with X-split using the C985 - 237FPS
Wow, I’m honestly surprised. That’s a fairly solid 34FPS (17%) gain, considering all I did was plug in a card to my PC. I was more just curious to see if I could get a noticeable difference in FPS with these settings. I would never stream with the game looking like this, however. So I bumped up the settings to “Medium” and checked the “Reduce Mouse Lag” button (Keeping off anti-aliasing/other effects) and repeated the same tests.
Starcraft 2 baseline bench - 202FPS
Streaming with X-split's "Screen capture" - 111FPS
Streaming with X-split using the C985 - 147FPS
Holy shit. If anyone had told me that these kinds of gains were possible (32%) using a $220 capture card, I honestly wouldn’t have believed them. Not only is the FPS bumped, but the game feels amazingly smoother. Streaming with the capture card eliminates all of the jittery laggy problems that occur when streaming.
My chip is no slacker. Even when it was clocked at 4.8 I could not stream without some noticeable lag, especially when scrolling on the sides of the screen. The C985 eliminates that lag.
Conclusion, Afterthoughts
Buy. This. Card.
If you are someone who is looking to upgrade your machine to get into streaming, I have two pieces of advice for you. 1) If you’re looking at streaming in high quality (720p@60fps or 1080p@30fps) you WILL notice some lag on even the BEASTLIEST of systems unless you want to run a two-PC set-up. Again, this is coming from someone with a GTX 580 and an i7 that was clocked at 4.8GHz. And 2) even though this card is somewhat pricey for a PC part ($220), the amount of money you save by purchasing this card over building a whole second system is irrefutable. I will never stream again without using this capture card. Ever since I first hooked it up and got it working, it has become an indispensable part of what I do every day. In case you’re not too familiar with me, I stream ~8 hours a day 6 days a week, so I’m very serious about my streaming hardware.
Questions/comments? Leave ‘em below, I’ll try to edit or update everything up here accordingly if there’s something I missed.
wtf is this shit nigga
How well will i be able to stream with
i5 750 @ 3.6Ghz
GTX 560ti
8gb ram
And a 30mb/down 2mb/up
WTF IS THIS SHIT NIGGA
I assume you stream at 720p60 then? I’ve always thought it was 1080p60, but it looks like this card doesn’t support it.
Best review of this card that I have read, with solid numbers, not vague crap.
Athlon X4 640 8 Gig ram
GTX 460
will this help or is it better my buying an I7 in the future
Destiny, I also use this card. Do you have any instances where you have noticed that certain links become blurred when viewing them on the monitor with the hdmi pass through? Example being the links on your home page under ‘twitter feed’. The time stamps appear blurry to me as well as on some other websites. However, if i move the browser window to a different monitor other than my main, the links become clear.
I guess when your team-less you need to make money somehow
Software capture needs to lock a video buffer in order to copy it. During this lock the game cannot render stuff and so your framerate goes down. It’s not necessarily an issue of CPU speed, just an issue of shared resources. As a capture card takes the video as it’s exiting the graphics card, there is no conflict in trying to read and write the same video buffer at the same time, so you don’t encounter the lag that you do with software capture.
EG.Destiny? what is this fake marketing bullshit nigga
I bought a few new parts a while ago that would allow me to stream once I have better internet.
i5 3570K
GTX 560ti
128GB SSD
8GB 1600MHz Dual-Ram
At what quality can I expect to stream without lag?
Are you sure the bitrate on the h264 output can’t be tweaked? Sounds like you’re throwing away quite some processing power there.
So, instead of buying a 220 dollar GPU, why not just invest in a better rig?
Get an I5 2500K
A Radeon 6870
And 8-16G Of Ripjaw DDR3 Ram..
I’m running Dual GPU/i5 2500k/16G RipjawDDr3 and can stream, without lag, or issues, at 1080p.
I feel like capture cards are so irrelevant and useless,
They’re just a sign that you’re doing something wrong.
Because “investing in a better rig” is 2X more expensive than just buying a better card. Also, with an i5-2500k you will feel lag while streaming at high quality. There’s no way that you don’t lag with only a 2500k while streaming at 1080p. It could just be that you’re too bad to notice because you’re not as picky as me.
The fact that you’re admitting to Xfiring two 6870′s and running 16GB of RAM makes me hesitant to believe any of this post is serious, though.
if u still cant stream by now, its kinda time to buy some new hardware, anyways, soonish.
i feel like, u made this review at least 1 year too late. (or idk when this capture card was released)
he made the review now because its only first now that x-split actually supports these cards.
Finally someone who knows what they are talking about.
I love how people come in here, saying they stream at 1080p no lag. Thats complete bullshit. And all they talk about is that they have X amount of ram, and some 700$ gpu. When none of that matters.
Most likely the PC a streamer has today has something equivalent to and i5. Im personally running a i7 920 @ 4.0 GHz only 6 gig ram and 5870 matrix, Upgrading my rig would make me need to buy a new mobo and a new cpu, so something like this will make me want to buy it, since its only 200$.
Thanks Destiny for the review.
Just ignore the idiots who post bullshit
Have you ever noticed video/audio desyncing? After a while when I’m streaming on Xsplit my audio and video start desyncing to where it’s noticeable.
Were you paid to make this review? You’ve always been big on transparency, so I’d like to know if this was influenced by money in some way or not
I’ve been trying to decide what to upgrade for so long. I asked myself “Do I upgrade to a 2500k? Do I get a better GPU?” But after reading this, I might just consider this… Definitely going to look into this a bit more. Hopefully I can buy one locally so I can return it if I’m not satisfied
Great review.
Do you have any experience with the Blackmagic products?
The BM Intensity Pro seems to be the exact same product as this (I obviously may be wrong). And I think it would be cool to look into their newer products as well
As far as i know the BMIP will not take any load of you regarding encoding the stream. It will help with the screen capture and that will ofc help! It does not run at anything above 1080p24hz “it does 1080I@60 if you like to use that” I have had a shit ton of trouble with getting it to lock to 24hz to not get screen tearing or splitting meaning you have to go to 720p@60 hz. I have just ordered this card so looking forward to testing it out and seeing if its as good as they say :>
I have never lag 1080 30 fps/720 60 fps or stuttering without capture card. (corei7 920 3.6ghz)
Stream program: Obs stream tool (completely free tool way better then Xsplit/Adobe)
Dxtory 2.0.119 as capture (best capture tool with the most functionality)
Starcraft2 framecap 100fps enough smoothness for gaming
Bitrate 3k-5k
on twitch.tv
Nice stuff. A couple of questions.
* How is the HDMI output configured? Are you mirroring your main 1080p gaming display to the HDMI port, or using a hardware splitter? How does the mirroring/splitting work if the gaming monitor is at 1080p and the Avermedia is at 720p? Do you have a second monitor running during this test?
* Do you think you could run this test with a midgame or lategame max battle and see what game FPS impact of the Avermedia is?
hello, plz tell me if there is any lag in the streaming, as i am tired of kainy, splashtop lag and really want to play games on my tablet.