Question Need 'low' priced Vid card for Image Editing (no gaming)

[thatsright]

Hi All - Well I have the second NVidia card dying in my rig. So need to get a new one. My rig is pretty much built around Photoshop 2019. I do some (maybe at or less than 6 times a year) 4k video editing and need to encode for Youtube 4k 25fps playback. When I've been editing in that, tasks are brutally slow, but for the amount of times I edit. Right now I have one 4k monitor. Slim chance I would add another one in a few years. Photoshop is more memory/cpu than GPU dependent. Though there are only 2 functions I regularly use that would need GPU. I'm sure if the memory bandwidth (128-bit, 256-bit) really matters. My power supply is 430W I think.

At this point I'd be partial to an AMD/ATI card. Budget is $150-200. 2-4GB of RAM I'm thinking? I just need PCI 3.0 and two display ports.

For the record, I DO NOT DO ANY GAMING. (Just saying so folks don't try to sell me on a $1,000+++ card )

 

[cfenton]

A 570 from AMD or a 1050 from Nvidia would be good options. I use Photoshop and Lightroom a lot and there's little to be gained from going beyond that performance tier. Basically, having a modern GPU will help with certain tasks, but diminishing returns set in very quickly if you go above mainstream cards.

 

[thatsright]

Does Memory Bandwidth really matter? 128-bit vs. 256-bit?

 

[coercitiv]

Get a 128 bit 4GB card. Whether it's 1050Ti or RX 560 doesn't matter.

If and only if you happen to find an RX 570 4GB at very good price (they've been coming down hard lately), go with that instead, the added bandwidth and OpenCl performance will be useful sooner or later.

Make sure you buy a model with decent cooling, one that will stop fans when the card is not under load. (they tend to mention in feature in tech specs and/or reviews, otherwise you can just look for heatpipes in card photos, since cards with heatpipes have more metal mass in coolers, and cards with big coolers can stop fans and still dissipate enough heat when chip is idle)

 

[VirtualLarry]

I second the RX 570 recommendation, some of them have three DisplayPort, one HDMI 2.0, and a DVD-D port.

I think that I might have an R7 260X or 250X card laying around here, you could have that cheap. I'll have to dig it out and look at it, I don't know if it has one DP or two mini-DP ports on it.

Edit: I've got a dual-fan XFX R7 260X 2GB GDDR5, with 2x DVI-D, 1xHDMI, and 1xDisplayPort.
Also have an MSI "shorty"/ITX single-fan GTX 950 2GB GDDR5, with 2x DVI-D, 1xHDMI (I think 2.0), and 1xDisplayPort.

I do have some RX 570 cards, with I'm sure ample DisplayPort connectors, but I don't currently want to part with any of them, and besides, you can get those new for like $150, and I paid nearly $300 for some of mine.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=27N-0005-000P3

 

[cfenton]

Does Memory Bandwidth really matter? 128-bit vs. 256-bit?

I'm not sure, but I doubt it. I don't notice a big difference between a 750ti I use on my secondary machine and the 1070 I have in my main machine. There probably are differences in some tasks, but nothing I do frequently.

 

[Kane2103]

Here's another one. On sale for 99 bucks I believe. https://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Rad...ie=UTF8&qid=1548993620&sr=1-6&keywords=rx+570

Also might wanna take a peek at Http://old.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales

always some good deals posted on there

**whoops. only x1 dvi-d output. I'll do some more looking around.**

 

[thatsright]

Here's another one. On sale for 99 bucks I believe. https://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Rad...ie=UTF8&qid=1548993620&sr=1-6&keywords=rx+570

Also might wanna take a peek at Http://old.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales

always some good deals posted on there

**whoops. only x1 dvi-d output. I'll do some more looking around.**

Thanks! Though I think I got it fixed. For some reason, when I turned off hardware acceleration in Photoshop I think that was it. Since then, no more crashing. Very weird as I'd expect it to just make Photoshop start working without issues. Perhaps me using it created/left some process in the background that eventually caused other things to crash. Maybe. Certainly a hella lot better than spending $200.

 

[eikelbijter]

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2017-NVIDIA-GeForce-GPU-Performance-899/

Somewhat outdated but quite interesting!

R