Graphics cards for non gaming vido editor

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fishacura

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Oct 5, 2006
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I'm building another PC and had a question on graphics cards. I am NOT a gamer by any means. I do however do a lot of video and photo editing (e.g. home movies using software like vegas movie studio....video rendering from one format to another). I always assumed the graphics cards were paramount to this process but wasn't sure. Can someone confirm?

I'm looking at something like the EVGA GTX 660. Seems to be good value but I don't want to underbuy or overbuy.

Build will be an i5 with an asus MB (not sure which) and 8GB of DDR3 1600.

Any insight is appreciated. I thought it might be pointless to shell out $400-$500 for a card given that I don't game but if it's necessary for video rendering I would then need to consider it.
 
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jitpublisher

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May 16, 2006
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The most important thing is a very strong, multicore processor (I would move up from an i5 to an i7 since the programs you are using do support, and will use the hyperthreading as an advantage over an i5), and then having a couple of hard drives to work with, so the PC is reading the input file from 1 drive, and writing the output file to another drive. Spending a ton of money on a GPU without first looking at these other parts of your system would indeed be a waste of your hard earned cash. Put the cash into a CPU, and high end drives, or even a couple of SSDs first, then pick a good midrange nVidia card that has CUDA technology.
There are some tutorials around the web that will inform you of how to set up Vegas for the best performance, and what hardware to use, like this youtube video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqdkGZ2GCkE
As far as photos, it really doesn't take much of a GPU at all to render or edit photos, that is nearly all CPU, memory, and hard drive. A properly built PC to run Vegas, will handle photos quite easily.
 
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fishacura

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Oct 5, 2006
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Thx. I think I am good on the CPU/board. What about the HD? I'm not going to shell out for an SDD but what specifically would you recommend as the most imporant HD factor? Forget size....is it speed, type of SATA, something else?
 
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jitpublisher

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Any new SATA 2, or 3 drive would be fine. I would only stay away from the "green" drives, they can be pretty laggy at times, but other than that, there is not a lot of difference in modern SATA drives anymore. They are all relatively fast for mechanical drives, and dependable.
 
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