Razer is taking another shot at the streamer market with its updated Ripsaw HD capture card, which looks to challenge Elgato’s own entry-level HD60 S with a lower price and 4K video passthrough.
Like the original Ripsaw, Razer’s goal with the Ripsaw HD is to make setting up a stream as simple as possible for streamers. To that end, basically everything is still built right into the Ripsaw HD, including a microphone and headphone jack for audio mixing.
Making streaming as simple as possible
Setup is equally simple: just plug in your console or gaming PC on one end of the HDMI input, a monitor for playing the game to the HDMI output, and your streaming PC through a USB-C port for passing along data to send to your viewers. (The Ripsaw HD still does need a PC to send captured gameplay to, though — it can’t record to an external storage device like the AVerMedia 2 Plus.
But where the regular Ripsaw — and Razer’s main competition, the HD60 S — only supported 1080p2 passthrough on the gameplay side of things, the updated Ripsaw HD supports 4K passthrough, so you can still play with better resolution while you stream. That said, if you want to actually stream in 4K, you’ll need to turn elsewhere, like Elgato’s 4K60 Pro card.
Still, at $159.99, Razer does manage to undercut Elgato’s price for the entry-level side of the market, while offering more features than the HD60 S. And ultimately, more competition to make streaming and capturing easier can only benefit gamers looking to give it a shot.