CUDA crucher query?

[bahnstormer]

I was just after some advice around where I could best spend another £200 or so on something that would beef up the video editing / video conversion speed.

Two main uses - converting my movie collection (currently stored on a media jukebox as uncompressed MKV's) into something like MP4's using DVDfab - I had just ripped them using makeMKV and now I have ~10Tb of the stuff!

Also struggling with a growing collection of 1080P home movies that need cropping / re-compressing / light editing.

My gaming requirements are VERY modest: CounterStrike:Source, which was running ~160FPS with max EVERYTHING on the old rig

The old C2QX6850 PC was really struggling with the video encoding and I was offered some 2nd hand parts, so I had an opportunity to move to something a little more modern on a modest budget - I also treated myself to a new case + cooler with an eye on a bigger upgrade at a later date - next year probably. My last major upgrade was ~10 years ago and last tweaks were 2-3 years ago!

New rig:
i7-3770
Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3
4x8Gb DDR3 (1600Mhz, but only CAS11!)
Corsair Carbide 330R case
Corsair H115i cooler

Old parts still in use:
500Gb Crucial MX100 SSD (OS)
2 x Seagate 2Tb's in RAID0
Radeon HD4870 512Mb
PCP&C "Silencer 600" PSU (600W sustained output)
DVDRW - Asus 24F1ST
BDRW - Pioneer BDR-209D
Logitech G110 kbd, G502 mouse, G430 7.1 USB headset.
2 x 1920x1200 24" LCD's (one high spec gaming, one very budget)

The RAID0 is just a local cache - I have a 24Tb NAS with cloud backup for the more precious data.

My initial thought was that a 3770K processor and overclocking was a waste.... and without some major spending on new RAM+mobo, I'm not going to improve the CPU beyond that, but that there was still a lot of scope with leveraging a newer GPU.

Assuming that is the best option, should I aim for something closer to the motherboard in terms of age (e.g. a GTX 690, with the dual GPU and extra CUDA units) or am I chasing the wrong thing here and better off getting more modern card like the GTX 1050Ti? Would a GTX1060 be a waste, given my next upgrade is probably still a year away? I don't need it for the gaming FPS and it would cost a lot more than a 2nd hand GTX 690.

I know the GTX690 "only" has 2Gb RAM per card, not actually 4Gb, but that's meaningless for me when a 512MB card already drives my two screens perfectly well!

Would people recommend the GTX690, GTX10x0 or are there any other suggestions where to spend ~£200.

Any advice appreciated?

 

[Supahos]

How much is a second hand 780ti? It should beat the 690 handily since most editing stuff doesn't care for SLI. Ryzen is what you're looking for 8c 16thread rendering monsters for less than half the cost of the Intel 8 core offerings. They should drop last day or two of Feb. Or first couple of March. But that's a bit off. You're probably good to go. But I do suggest the 780 over the 690 unless you have specific programs you're certain will take advantage of the 690

 

[iamacow]

The 690 is very old now as far as CUDA performance goes. a single GTX 1060 will crush it. With my GTX 1070 I get about 900FPS in dvdfab converting bluray to MKV MP4. HEVC gets around 200FPS. Hope that helps.

Before the 1070 I had a 780 TI which got around 450FPS

 

[bahnstormer]

Thanks - I'll read up on that a bit more... I'll add the 780Ti to the viable list as see how that goes!

Just looking at the fleaBay prices, it's looking like:
GTX690 £150-£180
GTX780 £160-£180
GTX1060 £180-£210
GTX1070 £330-£375

GTX1070 isn't crazy prices, but it's a fairly obscene price increase over the 780/1060 - worth paying for that when you're desperate for every last FPS edge you can get on other gamers. But I've now got three young kids at home and limited time for gaming, so I'm no longer in that market

I think it's going to need a little more reading to decide between a GTX780 or GTX1060, thanks for the advice guys, I'll let you know how I get on.

FYI - I think my old C2QX was getting ~30-40fps on DVD to MP4 conversions. Only slightly faster than real-time!

Regarding the "Ryzen" suggestion: I was using this (3rd gen i7) as a stepping stone to a DDR4 build at the end of the year (Christmas present), this just buys me the time to wait for the Skylake / Ryzen battle to fight itself out, the bugs to be ironed out and the prices to settle... but it might tip the balance in favour of the GTX1060 over the GTX780.

 

[bahnstormer]

Would something like the ASUS GTX 1060 3Gb (£180 @ eBay) be okay in my P67 motherboard (I think this is only PCIe v2 x16 OR PCIe v3 x8)?

In the fairly extensive IvyBridge "spare parts bin": I've also got a Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H as an option. The B75 is useless for overclocking, but if I'm sticking to the i7-3770 with modest memory, then it might make better use of the GPU as I think that supports PCIe v3 x16.

 

[bahnstormer]

And is the AMD Radeon RX 480 worth considering, instead of the GTX1060?

 

[Supahos]

PCI 2.0 is plenty to feed a 1060. You can actually of the 3770 a bit on any oc capable board. Just set multiplier up 2 from max turbo speed and it'll let all cores run 209 MHz above turbo. I have my 3350p running at 3.5 on all cores 3.7 single and it's a 3.1/3.3 chip

 

[iamacow]

The AMD cards do not have CUDA so DVDFab will run in software mode. PCIE 2.0 is more than enough for CUDA crunching and in fact only if you play at 4K will you use more bandwidth than 2.0 can provide (with select cards and games).

If you have apps that use OpenCL (not GL) than the AMD will crush any NVIDIA card. For some reason NVIDIA has very poor OpenCL optimizations.