How Patreon Helps: New CPU! (Patreon)

I thought I'd make some posts about how Patreon support helps me make more content, but for a while I haven't really had anything 'sexy' to show off; my Patreon and YouTube earnings basically go into hosting SirTapTap.com (neat, but hard to show off) and new hardware (which is sexy, but I haven't upgraded for years).

That changed a couple months ago when, thanks in part to all of your generous support, I was able to upgrade from an Intel i7 4770k to an AMD 3950X! On top of being almost 7 years newer, my new CPU has four times as many cores (16 physical and 32 logical!). 

Practically speaking, my video encoding and rendering is about 4x faster even with higher quality settings than before! I would often wait actual hours for sets of videos to render, so that is a WELCOME upgrade. It also means I will not have to use a second PC to stream as I was previously planning; streaming even at very high quality settings uses at most about 10% (at 720p 30FPS, my usual stream, more like 3%) of my CPU. It's now set-it-and-forget-it!

Basically I no longer have to worry about CPU performance at all for games or streams, and a lot less of my time is spend waiting in the editing process. This has been a huge relief for me and I thank you all so much for making it possible! 

Later this year I hope to get a GPU upgrade as well, which should help when streaming PC games.