Elgato Game Capture 4K60 Pro

Okay so I’ve had my 4K60 Pro for a little over 12 hours and I’m ready to make a statement: The Elgato 4K60 Pro is officially my FAVORITE Elgato Gaming product (I love my Stream Deck) and could very well end up being the best capture device on the market. It’s definitely the best looking! I’m upgrading from Elgato’s HD60 that I’ve had for a little over 2 years so this new card didn’t have to do much to impress me but I wasn’t expecting to be blown away by the 4K60 Pro. Installation was a breeze. My PC is housed in a Phanteks Ethoo Evolv case so the 4K60 Pro didn’t have any problem sitting in the case once it was popped in a PCIe slot. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone looking into this product but the 4K60 Pro is a x4 PCIe device so you’ll need to make sure that you have a compatible PCIe slot open on your motherboard and that your CPU has enough PCIe lanes available to allow the card to operate without hitting any bottlenecks. Elgato does recommend some pretty beefy specs for the 4K60 Pro to work properly and my PC falls in line with the recommended specs but from what I’ve heard “some” hardware that falls a bit short should work. The 4K60 Pro requires the 64-bit version of Windows 10. There’s no way around that but there might be some wiggle room with the CPU and GPU. My gaming/editing PC is nothing crazy but it gets the job done and I haven’t had any issues with the 4K60 Pro. For those of you using an Intel i7-6800k, EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW, Samsung 960 EVO m.2 SSD on a MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon motherboard you should be fine. Hits the recommended specs, has plenty of power, and you’ll have PCIE slots and PCIe lanes to spare. I can’t speak for AMD GPU users but for those of us using the latest NVIDIA GPUs the 4K60 Pro will use NVENC encoding. X264 encoding is available but it’s a bit of a resource hog even with the 8 core i7-6800k so I would definitely recommend you stick with NVENC encoding unless you prefer X264. It should go without saying but you don’t need a 4K capable console like an Xbox One X, PS4 Pro or even a 4K capable PC to take full advantage of the 4K60 Pro’s power. Those of you who have an OG Xbox One/PS4, Nintendo Switch or HDMI capable Xbox 360/PS3 shouldn’t shy away from the 4K60 Pro. It also allows you to record at 1080p up to 240hz and 1440p up to 144hz with a max bitrate of 140mbps. The quality is UNREAL if you’re willing to max out your settings but so are the file sizes so make sure you have the hard drive space to store all of your jaw dropping videos. One of the cool features offered with the capture software is being able to record at one resolution and have the 4K60 Pro passthrough another resolution to your display. For example, if you want to play Forza 7 or Gears 4 on your fancy 4K TV but don’t want massive 4K video file sizes you can have the capture software record in 1080p! It’s pretty neat and very considerate. I’m primarily using the 4K60 Pro to record from my Xbox One X in 4K and 1080p and everything has been working without a hitch. I’m still waiting on Microsoft to enable 1440p resolution output for the Xbox One X but I imagine the 4K60 Pro would work just as smoothly with that resolution as the others. I’m not a member of Dual PC Master Race so I don’t think I’d use the 4K60 Pro for recording video output from the same computer its sitting in. I don’t think the potential quality gain would outweigh the performance hit from the capture software over Shadowplay and because I have a G-Sync monitor I won’t get 144hz refresh rate over HDMI. I will test it at some point and definitely update the review. It won’t impact the score. I’m doing it for science! I had to bring this up at some point! The 4K60 Pro is a whopping $400. Is that a lot of money? Yes. Is it worth it so far? Absolutely. For those of you looking to step up your quality, in my opinion, this is the way to go. If you’re more comfortable with 1080p and looking to upgrade from an HD or HD 60 your wallet might stay a little greener if you decide to go with the HD60 S or HD60 Pro…But if you want to break into 4K resolution or higher quality content in general the 4K60 Pro is king. Other cards with the same features will run you twice the money and they don’t have the software suite that’s included with Elgato products. Of course, this wouldn’t be a fair and unbiased review if I didn’t bring up some of the issues I have with the 4K60 Pro... The one “problem” I have right now with the 4K60 Pro only applies to the handful of us that have 4K displays with HDR & Dolby Atmos… Neither are supported by the 4K60 Pro. I knew about this ahead of time so I had HDR turned off when testing out the card but it is a bit disappointing. These features might be tied to the hardware but maybe they can be patched in later? For the time being I’m going to have to buy an HDMI switch so I can play with HDR enabled when I’m not recording. Overall, I’d recommend the Elgato 4K60 to anyone with a strong Windows 10 PC looking to break into high quality content for YouTube and Twitch. It’s a new product from one of the best in the business that’s starting off on the right foot. This gets 5 stars from me! Good job Elgato!