Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsFor a dual PC setup, this is actually hard to set up and overall not a great experience....
Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2021
As most streamers have bought these to capture their gameplay from their PlayStations and Xbox's, some of us like myself are trying to capture our PC gameplay by using this product and ohhh boy... this was a pain in the a$$ to deal with.. I don't know where to start. I've been setting up and troubleshooting for DAYS and I think i've finally found the right settings.
My gaming PC is a Ryzen 3950x/RTX 3080. My stream PC is a ASUS ROG Gaming Laptop. Let me share my diary of my bad experience for over the past few days....
1. Hard crash. My PC has been hard crashing (blue screen of death) about 7-8 times by now.. YIKES. WHY? Honestly, I have no goddam idea.... yet according to another review a few posts below mine review, someone has also experienced blue screen of death crashes. He/she was using NDI (video stream link) which is in Beta atm.
My PC hard crashes EVERYTIME I start playing Black Ops Cold War while test streaming. It's only THAT game. Nothing else! After reading the comment about NDI, i've disabled it and BAM.. I was able to launch Cold War finally for the 1st time. Even though it says that Stream Link is still in beta, I don't recommend it using it.
2. Black screen. When I was test streaming my gameplay of Battlefront 2 and other games, i've noticed that streamlabs will show a black screen. I'm not sure what's the cause of this.. it could be NDI, my laptop being unstable even though it's a beefy laptop, or if 4K Capture Utility is not updated. I've finally updated 4K Capture Utility (i forgot haha) and I guess the issue is gone.. for now...
My experiments and experiences..... here's some interesting testing's i've done and came across.
1. If you're GPU only has 1 HDMI port like my RTX 3080 FE does and it's already being used for a monitor/TV, I can actually use a display port-to-hmdi cable and it's able to connect to ELGato just fine. Literally most of my issues could be gone if I had 1 more HDMI port in my 3080 FE.. come on Nvidia!
2. You can't use 2 different GPU's with ELGato. This is a possibility that this was causing the hard crashes on my gaming PC. Why am I using 2 different GPU's? I have 4 monitors and 1 is plugged to my backup GPU which is a old AMD GPU.
3. If you're still planning to use 2 different GPU's for multiple monitors, again, IT WON'T WORK! ElGato must be clone with your main monitor in Nvidia control panel IN THE SAME GPU!. And if ELgato is in your 2nd GPU, it will NOT be cloned and you won't be able to stream! I also used a RTX 2080 Super as a 2nd GPU and nope! It won't clone!
4. I haven't seen many NDI reviews, yet I don't recommend it personally due to the crashes.
5. Sometimes the 4K Capture utility app can be buggy and won't able to show gameplay. It's basically not perfect.
6. Sometimes when I exit out of my game, in streamlabs, it shows that my gameplay is frozen yet my cam and my stream (connected to my streaming pc) is fine as usual. So this can look unprofessional while streaming and it may cause you to force to restart OBS/Streamlabs or even the 4K Capture Utility.
7. There's a reason why dual PC streaming setups is a thing. We want our gaming PC's to not suffer from performance dips. Yet, sometimes I feel that Elgato is STILL affecting my gaming PC by making it feel a bit laggy at times.... even unresponsive. Basically if you turn on your Elgato and your streaming PC which is connected to your gaming PC through ELgato, your gaming PC screens are going to flash like crazy for a few seconds because it's setting up ELgato as a new monitor. And as a guy who has now 5 dam monitors, this is ANNOYING!
Well.... overall this experience has been rough. But crazy as it sounds, I would still recommend buying this product at your own risk ONLY if you know what you're doing and being mentally prepare to face the challenges. This isn't just a plug in and play at all.
And even though i'm facing tons of issues, it's so amazing to see my gaming PC performance not being affected while streaming. All of your streaming resources are controlled by your streaming PC and gaming PC is just doing it's job without being bothered by streamlabs. I still prefer this over a single PC setup hands down. But again, buy this if you know what you're doing!
