New card for old system

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mesapegasus

mesapegasus

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Aug 28, 2017
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Motherboard: Pegatron M2N78-LA (Violet6)
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 820 Processor 2.80 GHz
Case: Corsair 300R
Power Supply: Corsair CS750M (750 watt)
Slot: PCI Express x16
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Onboard graphics: nVidia GeForce 9100
OS: Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium SP1

I don't know which version of PCI Express I have, but I bought the original computer in 2010, so I assume PCIe 2.1.

I am running two monitors off my mobo, one VGA and one DVI. Videos played from local drives are dropping frames at 720p. I upgraded the case and power supply so I can buy a new graphics card. I would like to drive two HDMI 1080p monitors, playing digital video in resizable windows. I am not a real-time gamer, so not concerned with computing and texture mapping millions of polygons per second. I am not going to mine bitcoins. I may donate spare cycles to SETI or similar. I may get a TV tuner card to watch cable in a window. (That would be nice to have back again.)

In spite of 35 years of computing under my belt, I never looked at graphics cards before. I wonder if maybe the latest cards are too much for my system. How do I know if a card will be appropriate for my older system? What is the most appropriate category of graphics cards, or graphics technology, that I should be looking for?

I don't have to get the cheapest card. For example, once I settle on a line of cards, I may well buy the version with the most RAM. But I don't want to overkill it either.





 
Solution
BFG-9000
At this point you should prefer PCIe 3.0 x16 cards, which came out in 2012 from both AMD and nVidia, unless you intend to pursue only very old cards. PCIe 3.0 is fully backwards compatible with 2.0 and usually even works fine with 1.0/1.1 slots from before 2007 despite some power delivery spec differences.

For low end cards, there is no performance difference between any of them because even 1.0 x16 has double the bandwidth of the previous AGP 8x.
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Lehan123456789

Lehan123456789

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Sep 10, 2016
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Honestly if you are just video watching and stuff, almost anything will do. A GTX 1050 would be more than enough (overkill, in fact) to do anything you need, but you can't get anything much cheaper, and this will be a significant increase in power over something weak like a GT1030 or GT 710. If you are willing to go used something like a GTX 750 or 560ti would also be fine. An Rx 460 or 560 would also be fine.
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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Sep 17, 2016
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At this point, Youtube is mostly VP9 but you can force H.264 instead. Both require rather a lot of CPU power to decode and while your integrated graphics has Windows 10 drivers, it cannot help offload/hardware accelerate either codec so the entire workload is dropped onto your poor CPU.

Right now, the only discrete GPUs that can hardware accelerate VP9 are nVidia Maxwell refresh (GM206) and Pascal, which includes the GTX950 and GT1030. AMD promised VP9 decoding capability in Vega and Polaris, which includes RX460, but don't seem to have released drivers to do it yet (it's been over a year). Be aware that neither 1030 or 460 have analog-out VGA capability.

H.264 in Flash is offloaded by any nVidia card since G98 based 8400GS rev 2 and any AMD card since the HD4000 series.

For your local files, try playing in VLC player but be sure to toggle on "Use GPU acceleration" as it's disabled by default.

And RAM got so cheap in the recent past that even a GT730 was available with 4GB, an amount that the card could not hope to use in resolution or image quality features because it was just too slow. And it was slow 64-bit wide DDR3 too, so only served as a marketing number to tempt the uninformed.
 
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mesapegasus

mesapegasus

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Thanks to both of you for your suggestions.

I found out my slot is PCI Express x16. However, I understand that I can put a PCI Express 2.1 x16 video card in that slot. I assume I can also put in a PCI Express 2.0 x16 card. Would you agree with this?

All else equal, should I prefer PCIe 2.1 x16 cards? There do seem to be fine cards that just specify PCIe x16. Should I avoid them if the later ones are available, or should I focus on other metrics?
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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Sep 17, 2016
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At this point you should prefer PCIe 3.0 x16 cards, which came out in 2012 from both AMD and nVidia, unless you intend to pursue only very old cards. PCIe 3.0 is fully backwards compatible with 2.0 and usually even works fine with 1.0/1.1 slots from before 2007 despite some power delivery spec differences.

For low end cards, there is no performance difference between any of them because even 1.0 x16 has double the bandwidth of the previous AGP 8x.
 
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Solution
Lehan123456789

Lehan123456789

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Sep 10, 2016
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Nice, although overpriced due to the mining boom (and a bit overkill for this task)
 
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