Question Recommended System Upgrade for Video Editing?

emmmzz025

Prominent
May 7, 2018
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So I've just started editing videos, no particularly large projects, but I'm using SLOBS with a few animated graphics running etc. As well as ShotCut for editing afterwards.

For the first couple of months my system seemed to be coping OK, but a few days ago I started getting frames dropping in OBS and the recorded video is pretty much unwatchable.

The weather has been particularly hot during this period, as no AC, the room is probably 35-40c (the first hot weather there's been since I started editing videos), I'm not sure how much of a factor this is, but I downloaded Speccy to monitor the CPU temperature and found it was in the high 70c and often in the mid to late 80c whilst recording and pretty similar whilst editing in ShotCut too. I've also been doing a lot more editing over the last week and for prolonged periods too.

FWIW the temp is around 40-50 whilst idle, which seems high to me. I'd never checked it before this sudden hot weather.

My system is an ACER - XC-885 Intel® Core™ i5 Desktop PC .

Not the best system in the world, it was shop bought. Anyway, when I bought it I swapped out the HDD and replaced it with an SSD. There's more than 3/4 space left. I've got 8GB of RAM. No dedicated GPU.

I cleaned the stock CPU fan and removed the case cover, then cooled the room as best as I could by opening the windows late at night. This improved things a bit. The temp was down slightly and the recording had less dropped frames, still not great, but just about watchable.

I'm pretty clueless with tech but it does seem to be an issue with the CPU overheating (maybe because of the extra work I've been putting on it over the last week, together with the rise in ambient temperature) bringing down the performance.

Given all these details what would people recommend I do to enable me to record/edit these videos without too much trouble?

I was wondering if a better CPU cooler might help. Or maybe extra RAM, or even a dedicated GPU? Nothing crazy expensive, just something that would take some of the load off the CPU.

Any help is much appreciated. I've included a photo of the inside of the computer.

Is the spare slot (on the right hand side) a GPU slot?

6yyxht.jpg
 
That's a stock fan and those temps are about right for a stock fan in a case with inadequate airflow.

Since there are no intake fans or fan mounts on the case, you could just leave the side panel off.
I would suggest a low profile cooler like a noctua nh-l9i or similar if the side panel removed doesn't cool things down.

Although you didn't give all of the model number for your pc, it looks to be a slim variant, and with a 220w non-atx standard psu , you probably cant get a graphics card in there even if you wanted to without going over the power cap. At best, I 'd say to get another stick of ram either identical to the old one or a set of 2 in a kit, atm you have one stick running single channel, another stick will double the throughput and likely increase performance.
 

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