What Actually Limits a Live Stream From a Laptop

A stream is an encode job that runs for hours beside whatever you are capturing, which makes three things decisive. You want a hardware video encoder so the processor is not doing that work, a cooling system that holds its clocks across a three-hour session rather than a ten-minute benchmark, and enough upload capacity for the bitrate you intend to send. Frame rate in the game itself is a distant fourth.

Most South African fibre packages are asymmetric, so a 100/50 line leaves 50 Mbps upstream shared with everyone else in the house, and platform limits arrive well before that: Twitch caps Enhanced Broadcasting at 10 Mbps across all tracks combined. Choose the laptop for its encoder and its thermals, then check the line, because that order stops you paying for performance the connection cannot carry.