Help Choosing Graphics Card

[T-Nichs]

As some of you know, I am building a cheap rig for video capture and editing. I have everything down except for the video card. I am looking for a video card that supports multiple monitors, won't skip frames when recording, and won't freeze when I try to edit. I am looking to spend UNDER $175 and thought about this one but I don't know nearly anything about video cards. If you guys could give some suggestions and maybe give me a crash course on bits, streams, cores, core clock, and effective memory clock, that would be great.

Thank you in advance

 

[Guest]

Stream processing units/CUDA cores are the shaders or compute units in the video card that do the basic processing. Their clock speed is how many cycles per second they have, measured in MHz (millions per second).

Their performance varies depending on the architecture, for instance CUDA cores on GTX cards aren't easily comparable to AMD GPUs' Stream processing units. Generally rival AMD cards have a higher SPU count than the Nvidia counterpart, but the Nvidia GPUs usually have slightly better shader performance.

The memory bus/memory interface (128, 192, 256, or 384 bit) determines the width of the memory transfer bus. The memory clock is how many cycles per second the memory makes. The higher the memory clock and the wider the memory bus/interface, the higher the memory bandwidth which is the data throughput of the GPU.

Higher memory bandwidth is important for high resolutions, as is having more VRAM.

I would recommend this card over the 7870 you found. It's basically the same GPU (HD 7870 and R9 270 are the same), just from a more reputable manufacturer.

 

[EpicStarman]

Check this out, it is a bit over your price, but after rebates it is under. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121823&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

 

[T-Nichs]

@Hiebson that one you suggested has lower Mhz is that ok? I also thought of the other one b/c it has more ports

 

[Guest]

@Hiebson that one you suggested has lower Mhz is that ok? I also thought of the other one b/c it has more ports

It's not a big deal, you can match the clock speed with about 30 seconds in a program like MSI Afterburner. Overclocking video cards is extremely easy and unless you're getting crazy doesn't have a dramatic effect on heat since it doesn't involve changing voltages. You can really easily slide the clock speed from 920MHz up to about 1030MHz.

And the Sapphire R9 270 can support multiple displays. It's got an HDMI, a DVI-D and a DVI-I port.

 

[T-Nichs]

@Hiebson that one you suggested has lower Mhz is that ok? I also thought of the other one b/c it has more ports

It's not a big deal, you can match the clock speed with about 30 seconds in a program like MSI Afterburner. Overclocking video cards is extremely easy and unless you're getting crazy doesn't have a dramatic effect on heat since it doesn't involve changing voltages. You can really easily slide the clock speed from 920MHz up to about 1030MHz.

And the Sapphire R9 270 can support multiple displays. It's got an HDMI, a DVI-D and a DVI-I port.

Like I said I would be doing video capture via a capture card and video editing.. how many displays could I get out of the card you're suggesting and w/out overclocking would I be able to run at least three displays and video edit at the same time w/out lag?

 

[Guest]

I assume it can support 3 displays. And yeah, overclocking would just be to match the powercolor card you were originally looking at. You don't need to overclock just to run standard capture & editing programs across multiple monitors. Running lots of stuff at once is more dependent on having a good CPU and plenty of memory. The 270 shouldn't have any troubles at all.

Running applications in numerous displays isn't very taxing on the graphics card, it's only when the GPU is rendering 3D images over a greater number of pixels... for instance if you're editing 4K video, doing 3D modelling or playing games at 5760x1080.

 

[T-Nichs]

So, for my purposes, how much ram should I have? and how much cpu?

 

[Guest]

So, for my purposes, how much ram should I have? and how much cpu?

Depends on the intensity of the video editing you're doing. Assuming you don't intend to render out a video while simultaneously playing Battlefield 3, it won't be a huge deal.

What programs are you using and what are you capturing? Is it capturing gameplay from consoles and editing montages, commentaries and those sort of things? For those an FX-6300 and 8GB of RAM should be plenty. Though if you're doing more advanced overlays, some sort of graphical work or working with really high quality video while recording from multiple sources at once (for instance recording a few audio tracks while also capturing gameplay and streaming it) you would probably benefit from having 16GB of RAM and one of the eight-core FX chips or an i5 CPU.

Odds are if you don't know whether or not you need a really high end system, you don't. =)

 

[T-Nichs]

So, for my purposes, how much ram should I have? and how much cpu?

Depends on the intensity of the video editing you're doing. Assuming you don't intend to render out a video while simultaneously playing Battlefield 3, it won't be a huge deal.

What programs are you using and what are you capturing? Is it capturing gameplay from consoles and editing montages, commentaries and those sort of things? For those an FX-6300 and 8GB of RAM should be plenty. Though if you're doing more advanced overlays, some sort of graphical work or working with really high quality video while recording from multiple sources at once (for instance recording a few audio tracks while also capturing gameplay and streaming it) you would probably benefit from having 16GB of RAM and one of the eight-core FX chips or an i5 CPU.

Odds are if you don't know whether or not you need a really high end system, you don't. =)

Yea lol I will be mostly doing recordings from my monitor of online games/pc games, and also doing some video capturing from PS2 and Nintendo 64 and SuperNintendo and eventually XBox 360. I also want to know if I would be able to video edit, play online poker, have a browser running, and run poker programs simultaneously on the FX 6300 and 16 GB or Ram?

 

[Guest]

So, for my purposes, how much ram should I have? and how much cpu?

Depends on the intensity of the video editing you're doing. Assuming you don't intend to render out a video while simultaneously playing Battlefield 3, it won't be a huge deal.

What programs are you using and what are you capturing? Is it capturing gameplay from consoles and editing montages, commentaries and those sort of things? For those an FX-6300 and 8GB of RAM should be plenty. Though if you're doing more advanced overlays, some sort of graphical work or working with really high quality video while recording from multiple sources at once (for instance recording a few audio tracks while also capturing gameplay and streaming it) you would probably benefit from having 16GB of RAM and one of the eight-core FX chips or an i5 CPU.

Odds are if you don't know whether or not you need a really high end system, you don't. =)

Yea lol I will be mostly doing recordings from my monitor of online games/pc games, and also doing some video capturing from PS2 and Nintendo 64 and SuperNintendo and eventually XBox 360. I also want to know if I would be able to video edit, play online poker, have a browser running, and run poker programs simultaneously on the FX 6300 and 16 GB or Ram?

Video editing, yes. Rendering... not so much. Luckily render speeds will be quick and a 10 minute video would only take like 8 minutes to export. Rendering basically uses 100% of any CPU. Games use a mostly fixed amount (varying depending on the game), whereas rendering taxes what it can get. Whether you have an FX-4300 or an Intel i7 4960X, while you're rendering doing other stuff will be slowed down. But the faster your CPU, the faster the render will finish.

But for the most part yeah, the FX-6300 will be fine. You may not even need 16GB of RAM if the stuff you're doing isn't very intensive, but it could come in handy and there are a few modern games that are tough to run on 8GB systems. So if you plan to play the latest triple-A titles, 16GB couldn't hurt.

 

[itsVance]

Try this one. I am running the same one but the OC edition. Both come with GeForce Experience which includes free screen capture in game or desktop and records at 60fps. Records flawlessly with no skipping and it comes in under your budget.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125508&ignorebbr=1&cm_re=GTX660-_-14-125-508-_-Product