Older Asus P6T Deluxe v2 mobo (Core i7 920) - is it worth upgrading from GeForce GTX 260 graphics card?

[andrewilley]

My self-built workhorse PC is getting a bit long in the tooth, but has been doing everything I need of perfectly... until I start messing around with some 4K video editing. I'd like to give it a bit more grunt to get closer to real-time previewing in Premiere Pro CS6 / Vegas Video 13 / etc without having to replace the whole thing. It's got an Asus P6T Deluxe v2 mobo, with a Core i7 920 8xCPU.

At the moment I'm running mostly factory settings in the BIOS, the processor is clocked at 2.67GHz but I might try overclocking it to 3.4Ghz or 3.6GHz which is apparently very doable with this setup.

I've also currently got 6GB of triple-channel OCZ Gold DDR3 RAM which I've already decided to increase to 3 x 4GB of Corsair Vengeance triple-channel 1600 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004CRSM4S/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1). Incidentally, would it be worth keeping the existing 6GB in there as well (creating two sets of triple-channel memory, one of 3x4GB and one of 3x2GB?) or would that cause issues?

Now, to the graphics card... I'm currently running an XFX GeForce GTX 260 supporting two DVI/HDMI monitors (a 1920x1200 Dell U2415 mainly for photo/video accuracy, and an older 1280x1024 HP screen for other stuff). The mobo is only PCIe 2.0 x16, but I think that should accept most modern PCIe 3.0 cards (although I may not get the full benefit from one). At present, Premiere Pro CS6 and Vegas Pro 13 don't recognise any GPU as being present for acceleration purposes so I guess the card is just too old. However I can do simple playback of 4K 30p MP4 files full-screen on the 1920x1200 monitor with no frame-rate loss.

What would people suggest might be a good modern alternative graphics card (without breaking the bank, so perhaps around the UK £125-£150 range) mainly for video editing acceleration. Gaming is not a requirement, nor is outputting the video natively to a 4K screen, however I would like to be able to edit/preview relatively simple timelines in as close to real-time as possible.

Andre

 

[hang-the-9]

Video editing speed is CPU first. Upgrade that before the card. Your CPU is the lowest tier of the i7 in that model range, going to a 950 or higher should help you. 970 maybe since it jumps up to 12MB of cache from 8. You may actually be able to both upgrade the CPU (since they all would be used) and get a GTX 950 video card which are about $120-130 now after rebates.

 

[andrewilley]

Not a lot of 970s around at decent prices, but found a used 950 on eBay for UK £35 though - would that really give a major performance boost do you reckon? Never really considered buying a second-hand processor to be honest.

Andre

 

[hang-the-9]

Not a lot of 970s around at decent prices, but found a used 950 on eBay for UK £35 though - would that really give a major performance boost do you reckon? Never really considered buying a second-hand processor to be honest.

Andre

I would not say "major" compared to a 970, especially if you were going to overclock your 920. A 950 is basically just a faster clocked 920 since the core specs are the same. The higher cache does not show up till the 970. You may just want to overclock your CPU and see how it runs and just get a newer video card. Make sure you do a BIOS and chipset update if any are available before swapping cards.

 

[andrewilley]

Thanks for all your suggestions.

I've just added the new memory (6GB was filling up too fast, so I swapped my existing 3 x 2GB triple-channel for 3 x 4GB). The new Corsair Vengeance is actually a bit slower than the OCZ I had before (1600 MHz vs 2000 MHz) but the mobo wasn't using the extra speed anyway, thus the old RAM was only running at 1600 anyway, so I think this should be fine.

I looked at processors, and the i7 950 really didn't seem to offer very much extra over the 920 (the same 4 cores, same cache, just a little faster default clock speed). The 970 would have been better (6 core) but is very hard to find and very expensive, even used. So I've overclocked my current processor from the default 2.67GHz to 3.8 GHz, and just doing that has made a big difference to live rendering in Premiere. The overclock is nice and stable too, MemTest86+ ran fine overnight and a Prime95 stress test resulted in approx 70C core temps compared to 64C with default clock speed (idle temp is still about the same at around 40C, but I do have a pretty good heatsink and cooling fan on the processor)

Having done all this, I still wonder if being able to use CUDA acceleration might help too, especially with effects rendering? With my existing hardware, would a GTX 950 card offer anything much over something like a cheaper GTX 750ti for non-gaming use? Any particular brands to suggest, was thinking of maybe going with Asus?

Andre

 

[hang-the-9]

I don't know how well the video cards would speed up rendering, there may be benchmarks for that around, but I never looked them up.