How good are on board graphics

Haruspex

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Apr 25, 2012
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10,510
Hi

At the moment I am running a quite old spec machine which I intend to update quite soon with an Asus P8Z77-V PRO mboard, i5-2500k chip and 8 or 16GB of RAM.

Would I need to buy a separate graphics card, or would the on-board graphics be ok. I do play some games Morrowind/oblivion/Skyrim but mainly use the PC for Video transcoding and photoshop.

If on-board graphics are not up to the job, could I utilise my old card (256MB GForce 8600GT) and the LucidLogix Virtu MVP software of the ASUS? or should I think about adding a something like a Sapphire 11179-09-20G HD 6870?

Many thanks in advance for your advice

 

Helltech

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If you are doing video transcoding and stuff think about getting a card that utilizes cuda (Nvidia).

Onboard graphics are not going to be good enough for Skyrim or Morrowind, my SLI 260s struggle with it modded. A 8600GT will have problems also.
 

Haruspex

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Apr 25, 2012
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10,510



Many thanks for the reply and advice.

Could you recommend a rough Nvidia equivalent to the HD 6870, GPUs seem to change almost as quick as the weather so I am rather lost on this.
 
You would be best served to WAIT for the GTX6xx series cards to come out with a cheaper card. Currently only the GTX680 has been released and I don't think we'll see a $200 GTX6xx card for at least 4 months.

If you can't wait, then the GTX560Ti is the card you are referring to. Check out newegg, ncix etc for the best deal.

The HD6870 can be found for as little as $130 after MIR if you shop around. It's the best value currently for gaming.

CUDA:
Personally, I just use my CPU to transcode. Handbrake is very fast for my usage.

*You may wish to find a detailed article on the GTX680 and read about the new features. It also has a built-in encoder called "NVENC" for encoding H.264/AVC specifically and it's very fast with that.
 

Haruspex

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Apr 25, 2012
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Many Thanks for the reply

I will be waiting, probably initially use the on-board graphics or as I said in my original post my old card and the the LucidLogix Virtu MVP, it will be an excuse to have a bit of a fiddle with it.

Maybe the lack of CUDA will not be such a loss with i5 chips and ATI Stream seems to be a sort of equivalent - although I could be talking out of my hat on that one.

After doing a bit of scouting about, I don't think I can stretch to GTX6xx cards financially and even GTX560Ti seem a bit steep. Which is why I was thinking of a HD6870 although they seem to come in all sorts of incarnations.

 
Actually, if you do transcoding for professional uses, I would stay away from hardware-accelerated transcoding. While Quicksync and CUDA will provide very good transcoding speeds, they deteriorate video quality quite noticeably. There was an article here at Tom's about that, and CUDA-accelereated transcoding provided the worst video quality. Intel and AMD had similar quality, but none were quite as good as software encoding.

EDIT: Here's the link for the article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/video-transcoding-amd-app-nvidia-cuda-intel-quicksync,2839-9.html
 


The Radeon 6870 is a great card. I had one and liked it so much I got another. Mine are XFX 6870's, and I can vouch for them. While the next-generation cards are already available, there is no better offer at that price point yet (US$ 180).
 

Haruspex

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Apr 25, 2012
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10,510


Thank you for the advice and the link, very useful
 

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