I'm currently building my first PC which will be mainly for music recording/editing. I will probably do some photo editing too so I was wondering will I see any benefits from buying a cheap GPU or would I be better off just sticking to the onboard graphics??
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Will I see any difference?
- Thread starter Rhyswh
- Start date
I took this quote as it explains it very well.
Best Answer - Chosen by Voters
Those types of programs benefit from EVERYTHING. Whether it is your 8GB DDR3 1866MHz RAM or your 2GB HD6970 or your i7 2600K they all help immensly. WHY? These types of programs use a LOT of RAM. More than games depending on which of those programs is being used. Your 2GB of VRAM and your higher end Video card needs to be very strong to be able to support those types of programs. As you will lag in games so to will you lag or crash if your system isn't up to snuff. Your 2600K has hyper-thread support which those types of programs LOVE. The 2600K or 2700K is a multi-tasking VERY efficient CPU which is necessary to efficiently and quickly take care of what you need to get done. Should this be your bread and butter than it is time to move away from the gaming card and move over to an Nvidia Quadro or a ATI Firepro like this edited competitor . While these cards are VERY powerful they are not for games. These are specially designed for those types of programs. IF you are serious than you could also move over to a XEON dual processor board but that's a whole other ball of wax.The biggest er most overlooked aspect of those programs is the hard drive. This can be a HUGE bottleneck. A hard drive like edited competitor will read and write what you need to get done so it doesn't hold up the show. The weakest link will stop the show so BALANCE is key when setting up this type of system.Having a awesome system with an old school 7200 HDD with a platter and SLOW EVERYTHING down.
Best Answer - Chosen by Voters
Those types of programs benefit from EVERYTHING. Whether it is your 8GB DDR3 1866MHz RAM or your 2GB HD6970 or your i7 2600K they all help immensly. WHY? These types of programs use a LOT of RAM. More than games depending on which of those programs is being used. Your 2GB of VRAM and your higher end Video card needs to be very strong to be able to support those types of programs. As you will lag in games so to will you lag or crash if your system isn't up to snuff. Your 2600K has hyper-thread support which those types of programs LOVE. The 2600K or 2700K is a multi-tasking VERY efficient CPU which is necessary to efficiently and quickly take care of what you need to get done. Should this be your bread and butter than it is time to move away from the gaming card and move over to an Nvidia Quadro or a ATI Firepro like this edited competitor . While these cards are VERY powerful they are not for games. These are specially designed for those types of programs. IF you are serious than you could also move over to a XEON dual processor board but that's a whole other ball of wax.The biggest er most overlooked aspect of those programs is the hard drive. This can be a HUGE bottleneck. A hard drive like edited competitor will read and write what you need to get done so it doesn't hold up the show. The weakest link will stop the show so BALANCE is key when setting up this type of system.Having a awesome system with an old school 7200 HDD with a platter and SLOW EVERYTHING down.
Soldato
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I would opt for the HD5450 or HD6450... great little gpu's and tons more powerful than the crappy onboard graphics you get on any motherboard apart from a llano and fm1 board 
Soldato
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For £42 I would get this card. It requires a half-decent PSU and is only DX10, but is a rather powerful card for the money and supports CUDA.
What's CUDA?
I have a cooler master silent pro 600 which should be enough for a single GPU.
The only other issue I have is that it has to be as silent as possible, which is why I like the look of the HD 6450 silent edition!! I'm guessing it has no fan, how healthy is this? I don't want it to heat up the case too much!!
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CUDA is a parallel computing architecture which uses the power of a modern Nvidia GPU to accelerate the performance of applications which make use of it. Open source alternatives include OpenCL and Direct compute, which work with both Nvidia and AMD cards - but like CUDA the application needs to be written specifically to make use of these platforms.
If you can tell us what music recording/editing software you will be using then we should be able to tell you if they support GPU acceleration. If they do, then you will probably want a GPU more beefy than a HD 6450 - this GPU is fine for decoding HD video, but if you want it to do some proper computation it just doesn't have the grunt to help you too much.
As for a passive HD 5450 or 6450, as I mentioned above these cards are not very powerful and thus don't use much power or kick out much heat. So using a passive cooler on them is no issue.
If you can tell us what music recording/editing software you will be using then we should be able to tell you if they support GPU acceleration. If they do, then you will probably want a GPU more beefy than a HD 6450 - this GPU is fine for decoding HD video, but if you want it to do some proper computation it just doesn't have the grunt to help you too much.
As for a passive HD 5450 or 6450, as I mentioned above these cards are not very powerful and thus don't use much power or kick out much heat. So using a passive cooler on them is no issue.
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if your after something low profile and dont suck much power..
Some people may think im crazy here, but why not try a radeon 4350? 512mb Vram should give you enough for what you need... I actually had to use one of these cards to play games with for a short period of time when my graphics card packed up randomly...
for what it is.. it played COD4, COD5, and COD6 with playable fps constantly...
I know it isnt much of a beast, but it gets the job done... ive stuck a few of these in HTPC's in the past, purely for dedicate graphics and HDMI connection... can probably pick them up for about £30 or something now....
EDIT: scrap that, yes get a 6450. with 1gb VRAM... cant go wrong there especially at those low prices..
Some people may think im crazy here, but why not try a radeon 4350? 512mb Vram should give you enough for what you need... I actually had to use one of these cards to play games with for a short period of time when my graphics card packed up randomly...
for what it is.. it played COD4, COD5, and COD6 with playable fps constantly...
I know it isnt much of a beast, but it gets the job done... ive stuck a few of these in HTPC's in the past, purely for dedicate graphics and HDMI connection... can probably pick them up for about £30 or something now....
EDIT: scrap that, yes get a 6450. with 1gb VRAM... cant go wrong there especially at those low prices..
Personally I would avoid anything branded "refurb" and "Nvidia" like the plague.
All it means is "baked in a reflow oven and will soon fail".
Personally I would stop being a duck's bottom and spend £100 on something reasonable like a 460 or 6850.
Like I said earlier, I wasn't planning on getting one at all but if a £40 will be a big improvement to onboard then I will, but I'd rather not get one than spend a £100!!
Rhyswh,
Seeing as you'll be doing music editing a lot more than photo editing then I would suggest, for now, to just build the rig with just the onboard and see how it copes. If it seems like it is somehow struggling when you do come to do some photo editing then upgrade it.
Seeing as you'll be doing music editing a lot more than photo editing then I would suggest, for now, to just build the rig with just the onboard and see how it copes. If it seems like it is somehow struggling when you do come to do some photo editing then upgrade it.
Soldato
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Yea, those audio applications don't currently use GPU acceleration - so there really isn't any benefit to be gained from a discrete graphics card. As for photoshop, there is a bit of extra performance to be had, but if you aren't using it too much then the onboard should be good enough.
If you haven't bought the CPU yet (you sig says "i7 2600") then I would strongly suggest you get the K-series version of that CPU - the i7 2600K. As this one not only allows proper overclocking (which is very easy to do and allows significant performance boosts in CPU-heavy applications) but it also has an onboard GPU which is roughly twice as powerful as the one on the standard i7 2600.
If you haven't bought the CPU yet (you sig says "i7 2600") then I would strongly suggest you get the K-series version of that CPU - the i7 2600K. As this one not only allows proper overclocking (which is very easy to do and allows significant performance boosts in CPU-heavy applications) but it also has an onboard GPU which is roughly twice as powerful as the one on the standard i7 2600.
The K is one major bonus indeed. One minor bonus, here at OCuk at least, is that it costs the same as the non-K version for £233.99 inc vat each
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Very well said,im having to return my one for a second time after overclockers telling me it worked and charged me a fee to test it only to get it sent back and it still doesnt work. Tried it in another brand new P8Z68-V motherboard and that didnt work either so its not the motherboard at fault.
3 other ATI graphics cards work in it so that just proves the motherboard is NOT the issue its the so called "refurbished" peice of junk from PNY thats faulty. i cant even get my one to be detected unless the BCLK is higher than 102mhz......make of that what you will. the strange thing is it can run things like kombustor and certain stress tests but as soon as you go to play a game it just dies almost instantly. Ruled out driver issues too with a clean install of Windows 7
The GPU was overheating in games to 100c and higher so i removed the heatsink and was totaly shocked by what i saw. PNY had put some new watery silver coloured paste ontop of old white ceramic paste,they didnt even bother to clean it off before applying the new stuff when they "refurbished" it and the PCB was significantly warped in my opinion.
I cleaned it up and put MX4 paste on it and it did reduce the temps considerably but it lasted about a week and died.
Because overclockers told me its working and i had no reason to doubt them i stupidly bought a 460 GTX off fleabay that arrived broken with bits stolen/lost by the postman or the store it came from so now im having to send that back too.
Avoid it like its the plague!
Take ALXAndy's advice and spend at least £80-£100 on a graphics card,you wont regret it and will last you for a good while!
Last edited:
[timko];21479680 said:
I think I might do this, just thought if a £40 card would give me better performance in photoshop then I might as well.
Yeah, I've decided that I will be getting the k version, just hope I can afford it!!! I'm currently in the process of buying a house and just been told I need to come up with an extra £1600 for stamp duty even though when I started the process there was no stamp duty!!!! Damn Goverment!!!!
Soldato
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If you are quick the i7 2600K (retail version) is currently only £210 on the OCUK shop.