Elgato 4K60 S+ Game Capture Card Review

Performance

One of the main selling points of the 4K60 S+ is how compact it is. It’s not exactly going to fit in my trouser pockets comfortably, but it’s still pretty portable overall. For chucking in your bag with your peripherals, it’s fine. That means you can easily port it to venues, events, friends houses, etc.

Obviously, once it’s on your desk, just hook up the required cables and you’re good to go.

When it’s powered up and you’re recording, it’ll light up red, but that’s about it. There’s no display or other feedback here, it just gets recording. That being said, you do get more granular control of the settings, capture rate, etc, if you’re using the desktop software.

Right now I’m just playing with it from my PC. So I set up an HDMI cable to the Elgato and Windows 10 detected it as a secondary 4K HDR capable display. So, at least we know that aspect works easily enough. However, be sure to set up your audio right as you can see mine is hitting the red line, I had a huge feedback loop that spoilt some video I captured.

In the software, you can quickly adapt the settings to capture and also stream the footage in your required format. Honestly, it’s all pretty easy to set the input and output format. You can also update the firmware here, but ours seemed to be fully up to date out of the box.

I like that you can easily choose the input audio here too, make sure you don’t duplicate it or it’ll listen to its self and give you a heck of a feedback loop. Don’t forget to tick Enable HDR too, otherwise Windows may not be able to detect it. Also, your consoles may output and it should just record in HDR direct to the SD Card. However, if recording on a PC via the USB C cable, you’ll need to choose this option. Again, easily done.

All the rest is pretty obvious really, just choose where to save. As you can see, the 4K60 S+ is its own video encoder, so it’s not putting ANY of that overhead onto your PC’s CPU or GPU. The interface here is purely telling the external device what to do and simply using your PCs hard drive to save the results, so it’s very requirements of the PC are pretty low.

I do like the option for adjusting the bitrate and the flashback recording. However, I suspect leaving them at their default will be absolutely fine for 99.9% of users. Format typically defaults to the input resolution though, keep that in mind.