increase in Performance not proportional to increase of Hardware juice.doesn't scale
increase in Performance not proportional to increase of Hardware juice.doesn't scale
They will work, but they will be a waste of money. Unless you have a CPU-upgrade in mind, then the GTX560 will offer no extra performance over a much cheaper card, simply because it will have to wait for your CPU to catch up. Also the G31 is quite an old chipset, and was in its time regarded as an economy model compared to the P35.Originally Posted by ulillillia
You can get a completely new setup for the price of a GTX560, with a new motherboard, CPU and RAM - this would increase performance during video encoding/playback, a GTX560 in your current system will not.
Edit: Seems your chipset only has PCI-Express 1.1, not 2.0. It _should_ still work but the card will obviously be limited by the slower bus, yet another reason not to waste your money on such a fast card.
Last edited by Neo1; 07-06-2011 at 02:14 PM.
How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
If you only want to play videos, just get a modern low end video card. Even something like the 8400 GS or GT210 will do. They go for ~$20 if you look hard enough. Anything above 7000 series support hardware video decoding. They won't help with encoding, though. Only a faster CPU will.
There is no point getting a high end GPU if you don't play games. Even the lowest end cards you can buy today will play 1080p fine.
Tom's hardware publishes every month a nice GPU card. Every level represents an upgrade in GPU performance. What you are after, my guess, is any of the cards in the 9th to 11th level.
These are all cards that are mostly still up for sale and at fantastic prices. I personally owned a HD 4770 until recently and was a very good card for both video and gaming.
Discrete: 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS 512 MB
Go (mobile): GTX 280M, GTX 285MDiscrete: HD 4770
Mobility: HD 4860Discrete: 8800 GT 512 MB, 9800 GT
Go (mobile): 9800M GTX, GTX 260M (112), GTS 360M (GDDR5)Discrete: HD 4830, HD 5670, HD 6670
Mobility: HD 5770, HD 5750Discrete: 8800 GTS 640 MB, 9600 GT, GT 240 (GDDR5)
Go (mobile): 9800M GTS, GTX 160MDiscrete: HD 2900 XT, HD 3870, HD 5570 (GDDR5), HD 6570 (GDDR5)
Others here may have more opinions on this table. But I think the above fits nicely into your requirements.
Last edited by Mario F.; 07-06-2011 at 04:15 PM.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
1. Never buy a video card for video compression unless said video card is solely designed for this task. Some workstation video cards are built for this but are crap for 3D graphics. They are also some of the most expensive video cards out there.
2. As has been said all modern cards that support DX10 and DX11 will support DX9 on XP. I expect support for DX9 to fall off very soon so I am not sure how long this will be true. I fully expect manuf. to dump support for DX9 and only support DX10 and DX11. From a maintenance standpoint supporting more than 2 versions of any software is extremely difficult and costly. The trend appears to be that MS wants to drop XP like a bad habit and half of its technologies along with it so they can push the newer tech. I would say mainstream support for DX9 is directly linked to the lifespan of the XBox 360. Most PC users have moved on yet the industry is holding them back b/c most studios release for XBox and thus DX9.
3. As to the question about the card working...as long as the mobo supports PCI-E x16 or in general terms the video bus type on the board then the card will work. PCI-E cards will not work with AGP and vice versa.
Cards like 8800GTX, GTX285 and HD2900XT are huge, cumbersome, power sucking beasts. They are old top-of-the-line models, and not worth owning today, also they have been out of production for eons so i doubt you'll be able to find any in stores. However cards such as the HD4830 or HD5670 or even an old 9600GT are great cards, theyre small and they are not as hungry as some of the other ones i mentioned.
How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
I have a 3 years old 9600 GT and it's awesome. Got it for about $100, probably around $50 now. Plays Starcraft II (and any other game I've thrown at it so far) on highest setting in 1920x1080. I can finally honestly say I don't see any point in getting a better video card. Also doesn't use much power, and is pretty tiny.
There's even a "green" version that's a little slower and doesn't require external power. It's significantly more expensive, though. There is no way you can make that extra money back through electricity cost, unless you live in a place with insanely high electricity rate. So it's mostly just for tree-huggers. Or feel-good tree-huggers anyways. If you consider the environmental cost of a separate line of product (manufacturing and transportation), it may not even be more environmentally friendly after all.
