Plz Help me find an ~$100 video card - Does it even exisit?

[thatsright]

I have a 4 year old X58 Intel mobo with a Nvida 9800GT video card. It is dying and I am trying to find a competent video card for under $100. I DO NOT DO ANY GAMING. My rig is just for Photoshop. The most important thing to me (besides price) is for the card to have a 256-Bit memory bus or higher. I dont care about how much memory it has. I really only use my PC for Photoshop. I know I can get a PCI 3.0 x16 card or older, but its seems like there is not a card with my specs. I also have a 430 watt power supply (I think) so it cant be a souped up card

Thoughts? Believe me, I've done the google/newegg/amazon search and nothing!

I am even willing to buy a refurb card as long as I can get an extended warranty.

 

[96Firebird]

HD6970?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...CE&PageSize=20

Why does it need to be 256-bit?

 

[AntonioHG]

I see a 6970 at $99 from Powercolor:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131578

256-bit memory bus.

The rest of the cards are 128-bit -- why is it important that the cards have 256-bit bus?

Ninja'd

 

[thatsright]

Sorry I forgot to mention that the card has to be Nvidia based card. I have my monitor color calibrated to these drivers. If I get a ATI card it will be a nightmare to redo everything.

The 256+ bit bus is because if less, it will take forever for photoshop to generate layers. It uses the video card for things like this.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Yes, if you dont do any gaming, why be concerned about a 256 bit bus? In any case, that 9800GT you have is 256 bit but only GDDR3. A newer card with 128 bit GDDR5 will have comparable bandwidth, all other factors being equal.

As a matter of fact, I retired a 9800GT about a year ago and went with a 128 bit GDDR5 HD7770 and it is clearly faster than the 9800GT was, although the 9800GT was a great card for its time.

But if you dont want to do any gaming, I would get something like a HD7750. That card is power efficient, and does not even require a 6 pin connector. If you watch carefully you should be able to get a new one with warranty for 100.00 or less.

Edit: just noticed you want to stay with nVidia. Then for a bit more, I would suggest a GTX750 or 750TI. They are both new and very power efficient. They dont have a 256 bit bus, but are GDDR5 so should have comparable bandwidth at least for graphics. I dont know how that translates to photoshop. But you have to go fairly far up the gpu foodchain now to get a 256 bit bus on a new card, especially nVidia. The 750Ti is very nice, but usually runs around 130.00 or so on sale. You might be able to find the vanilla GT750 close to 100.00.

 

[96Firebird]

The 256+ bit bus is because if less, it will take forever for photoshop to generate layers. It uses the video card for things like this.

I think you should be looking more at bandwidth than simply bus width.

 

[NTMBK]

Bus width is meaningless without memory speed. A narrow bus with fast memory can be better than a wide bus with slow.

 

[DigDog]

i fail to see the problem.
go to ebay, find *any* card for $100, profit!
you can probably get a GTX 580 for that.

 

[bononos]

I have a 4 year old X58 Intel mobo with a Nvida 9800GT video card. It is dying and I am trying to find a competent video card for under $100. I DO NOT DO ANY GAMING. My rig is just for Photoshop. The most important thing to me (besides price) is for the card to have a 256-Bit memory bus or higher. I dont care about how much memory it has. I really only use my PC for Photoshop. I know I can get a PCI 3.0 x16 card or older, but its seems like there is not a card with my specs. I also have a 430 watt power supply (I think) so it cant be a souped up card

Thoughts? Believe me, I've done the google/newegg/amazon search and nothing!

I am even willing to buy a refurb card as long as I can get an extended warranty.

Your old 9800gt is ancient and doesn't have opencl1.1. A newer card even if its 128bit on the memory interface could be alot faster for you. And $100 isn't much to get a current 256bit memory graphics card. The older 6970 is available in the link given above.

Benchmarks seem to show that photoshop is bottlenecked by something else other than the video card once past low end models. So getting a Nvidia 650/AMD 260 (for somewhere around $100) might fit the bill.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CS6-GPU-Acceleration-162/
Or maybe the benchmarks don't manipulate images large enough with many layers which would separate the higher end cards.

The cpu and harddisk is important as well. Putting a scratch directory on ssd would help.

 

[Ken g6]

I'm going to guess that your 9800GT's RAM runs (ran?) at 2GHz or less? Well, this GTX 750 runs at 5GHz! That's only on a 128-bit bus, but it's equivalent to 2.5GHz on a 256-bit bus. And it's on sale for $99; $89AR.