Sub-$50 card for non-gamer?

[Jidis]

Hi,

I recently ordered parts for a Ryzen 5 2600 system as an upgrade from an old Q6600 machine and didn't realize the motherboard's graphics ports were only active with GPU-equipped processors. I'm quite a bit clueless on current hardware. The card I'm running now is a fanless MSI NX8600GT 256M with dual DVI ports.

What would be a full size x16 dual port display card a bit closer to the Ryzen 5 era in the sub-$50 USD range? I mainly do audio and just need occasional dual display capability (non-mirrored).

Much Thanks!

 

[Darkbreeze]

This is probably one of the better options for a sub-50 dollar GPU card currently available.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GT 710 2GB Video Card ($48.89 @ OutletPC)
Total: $48.89
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-10-10 18:40 EDT-0400

Even for a non-gaming machine I'd probably recommend a GT 730 or 740 though. But, those are going to usually run more in the 60-70 dollar range. A GT 1030 would be even better, offering support for some newer features not supported on those older cards. Then you're looking at more like 90-110 bucks though.

 

[Jidis]

You sold me Darkbreeze. You sounded like the 1030 would be worth it, so I went ahead and sprung for the extra. I opted for another fanless one, and it was a few dollars more (a bit over 90 total), but I'll hopefully be getting it tomorrow through Amazon Prime, in time for the rest of the stuff from NewEgg which is supposed to show up Friday. I hope this thing is OK in a regular size case. It's "low profile", but I guess that's just the card and not the bracket.

Much Appreciated!

 

[Darkbreeze]

Yes, that's just the card. The brackets are all standard. Even mini-ITX cases have standard sized I/O panels and PCI slot openings. They have to in order to support standard hardware.

An additional benefit to that card is if you are inclined to do light or casual gaming, so long as it's not a demanding title you should have no problems. Even a semi-demanding title at 1080p with low to mid settings would probably be playable at least. But there are a lot of productivity processes that make use of the GPU in addition to the CPU, so having a mildly capable graphics card has a lot of benefits that are not gaming related.

Ripping Blu ray's or DVDs, or some encoding engines, among other things, take advantage of lightning shrink and other GPU intensive assistance processes to help speed things up so it's worthwhile all the way around. Certainly though, it might have been better to have just ordered a CPU that HAD integrated graphics, but since you had already ordered the parts that wasn't really an option AND this will have better performance than any current integrated graphics that I'm aware of.

 

[Jidis]

Sounds like it will hold me for a while Darkbreeze. Re: The other CPU's- I almost switched to one after the fact when I found out about the dead ports, but the nearest thing was a step down to a 4-core something. I figured I'd just grab a card.

Good to hear some things may be able to offload some processing to it. I'm constantly doing encoding and DVD stuff, and something will probably acknowledge it. Most of my audio DSP is handled by a PCIe card. There actually was stuff happening a few years back with CUDA based audio plug-ins, but I'm not sure where they are with it now.

Thanks Again

 

[Darkbreeze]

Yes, GPU accelerated computing processes are finding their way into many things these days, beyond gaming and display functions. Much depends on the specific application and in many cases are only found in paid software, but really it can be anywhere.

If you do a lot of DVD or Blu ray stuff, I highly recommend DVDfab. It is rather expensive, but for copying, ripping, burning and encoding there are few applications that can compare to it. I use it exclusively for most DVD and Blu ray projects. Not something the average person would want to pay for, but then again, not everybody is the average person. LOL.