Simby and LuckyShots upgrade their Mixer streams with ROG

Articles: Gaming
Jun 02, 2020 Written by:Chris_Barr

Earlier this year, we announced an exciting new partnership with Mixer, as well as several new additions to our ROG streaming team. Today we're taking a closer look at two of our newest Mixer partners, Simby and LuckyShots, to learn their history with gaming and to talk about how ASUS hardware has upgraded the quality of their streams.

Retracing diverse paths to streaming glory with LuckyShots and Simby

Everyone's gaming journey is different, and that holds true for both LuckyShots and Simby, who both come from very different backgrounds. Neither of them had dreams of streaming when they picked up their first controllers, but each of their paths eventually led them to Mixer, where they built strong communities of their own.

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Back in the days of Halo 3, LuckyShots was primarily a console player competing professionally in MLG tournaments around the country with his friends. He joked that during that time, "the only game that existed was Halo. There weren't any other games. I didn't own an Xbox. I owned a Halo machine." However, things weren't the same when Halo 4 came out. The teammates he used to compete with weren’t able to travel to tournaments any longer, and the game just wasn’t as fun for him as the previous entries in the series. At that point, he decided to branch out to the PC with various shooters as well as games like League of Legends.

LuckyShots earned his moniker as he honed his skills in FPS games at LAN parties and tournaments when he pulled off ridiculously difficult kill after ridiculously difficult kill. After he heard fans and critics alike shouting "lucky shot!" enough times, he happily adopted it as his calling card. Eventually, he was encouraged to start streaming Halo by friends who found him entertaining to watch.

LuckyShots landed on Mixer back when it still went by its original name, Beam. As an early adopter, he found the community extremely welcoming—a characteristic that has played a large role in his decision to continue streaming there.

Simby first cut her gaming teeth back when she had to fight with her siblings over Mario Kart 64. It wasn't uncommon to find a teenage Simby over at a friend's house playing on their console, either, as she didn't always have one of her own. At age 16, she had to have surgery for scoliosis, a procedure that required her to spend months recuperating. During this period, her boyfriend gifted her an Xbox, and she "got super into Call of Duty." She spent countless hours playing match after match, honing her FPS skills.

By 2018, she had made a full recovery from her surgery and split her time between working out and video games when she wasn't working her full-time job at Chipotle. A bad back spasm once again required her to take a break from physical activities. But this time, she wasn't content with simply spending her time gaming. She also decided to stream her games and try to connect with other people on Mixer.

When she saw the option to stream directly from her Xbox, Simby remembered that there was an unopened webcam in the house, and decided that it was the perfect time to hook it up. Relying on the console for streaming and an old laptop to manage the chat, she quickly grew a large following on Mixer. While she never expected to connect with so many people, she said that everything came together perfectly and that it "felt like fate."

Upgraded battlestations

While many of us started our gaming adventures with a console under the TV and a controller in hand, that gear is no match for a powerful gaming PC at your side. When we partnered with our newest Mixer streamers, we outfitted them with all the necessary gear to help them stream games at their very best.

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Simby's PNK-drenched setup

When Simby first got her hands on her new ROG Strix GA35 desktop, she was still playing exclusively on her Xbox. With the power of an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and one of our GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs at hand, she quickly converted to PC gaming. We also supplied her with a full set of our PNK LTD peripherals to match her aesthetic.

Overnight she went from playing console games at 30 or 60FPS to running PC titles like Fortnite at 280FPS on her TUF Gaming VG279QM monitor. It was such a dramatic leap that she hasn't looked back. She regularly gets comments on her stream about how smooth it looks, even with her game settings cranked up. When people ask how she's able to maintain those framerates while also streaming on the same system, her answer is simple—it’s all thanks to the power of the GA35.

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The ROG Strix GA35 in its natural environment

LuckyShots had already been gaming and streaming on a PC for quite some time when we partnered with him earlier this year. In fact, he had recently built a new custom PC around one of our motherboards when we reached out to him. When we sent him his own ROG Strix GA35, it wasn't just an upgrade from what he was using before. It allowed him to use his old system to handle all the workload of his stream encoding. Having a two-PC stream setup is a common way to take the burden of encoding off of your main desktop. We already know that the GA35 can handle everything on its own, but now every ounce of its computing power can go directly to whatever he's playing.

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A view from the driver's seat of LuckyShots' battlestation

Much like Simby, he often gets people asking how he's able to keep framerates as high as 280FPS with maxed-out settings in games like Fortnite and Valorant. However, one of the biggest improvements to his stream is something that his viewers don't see at all. He mounted our sprawling 49-inch XG49VQ above his TUF Gaming VG279QM, and it acts as a command center for his stream. Thanks to its behemoth size, LuckyShots can spread out windows for his chat, stream controls, music, and more. With a quick glance up, he's able to see everything he needs to manage his stream.

Both LuckyShots and Simby can be found streaming on their respective Mixer channels regularly throughout the week. Check out their pages to find out their individual schedules and watch them play games on their powerful GA35 desktops.