The best external game capture card for Xbox, PS5, and more is on sale right now
The Elgato HD 60 X is a personal favorite of mine and is something I use basically every day for this job. And hey, it’s currently on sale for Black Friday.
Is an excellent Black Friday Xbox deal or even a Black Friday PC deal depending on your gaming flavor, since it allows you to capture from an HDMI source and record via USB your very own game footage. You’d need a fairly powerful rig to run a game and this capture card from the same system, but there’s also the PCIe Elgato 4K60 Pro on sale too (opens in new tab) if you want to record PC gaming footage on a desktop.
This Elgato HD 60 X has HDR10 recording and passthrough, along with VRR pass-through, making it ideal for those with an Xbox Series X|S or a PS5. By connecting this in-line via between your gaming device and your monitor, you can capture the footage feed via a connected USB port to your PC, saving 1080p 60 FPS footage, or 4K 30 FPS footage for editing or live streaming. Indeed, you can use this capture card with any streaming software, and we use it regularly for streaming and capturing footage for my awesome Xbox Two Podcast that you should definitely check out. #plug
- Xbox controllers: Amazon (opens in new tab) | Razer (opens in new tab) | Dell (opens in new tab) | Walmart (opens in new tab) | Best Buy (opens in new tab)
This has the most powerful pass-through experience of all Elgato’s capture cards, even the $500 4K60+ which as of writing does not pass-through VRR 120 FPS refresh rates. With this card, you can pass through full 120 FPS without losing FreeSync, which is ideal for those with the best gaming TVs for Xbox and the best PC gaming monitors who don’t want to sacrifice the quality of their own feed while streaming or capturing game footage.
The Elgato software is a pleasure to use whether it’s natively or with an external tool. There are no limitations on how you can use the system, too. There are no forced watermarks, and no hidden subscriptions, this is literally just plug-in and play, and remains my go-to brand for all my video game capture needs.
I will note, however, if your connected PC isn’t at least running a modern-ish quad-core processor at minimum, you may struggle to maintain the video capture feed reliably. Be sure to check the speed of your USB ports and the power of your GPU and CPU before trying this one out, or consult the minimum specs on the Amazon listing above.
