Newer video card on an older system.

GregFlowers wrote on 6/30/2015, 5:27 PM
I've been doing some minor upgrades to my older desktop system. I use Vegas 13. Would putting a newer video card in an older system improve the timeline playback? I have a Q6600 quad core desktop with Windows 7 and 8 GB of ram. It currently has a GeForce 8500GT with 512MB GDDR2 800MHz. The motherboard only has a PCIe x16 slot. No PCIe 2.0 or 3.0 x 16. Would it help with 3D animation programs as well? Or would I just be wasting my time.

Comments

astar wrote on 6/30/2015, 9:19 PM
You can, but you probably would not see much advantage. A used AMD 5770 (sony's old GPU minimum recommendation,) 6970, 7970 would give you timeline GPU acceleration. Your system has only x16 1.1 and ddr2 ram. Those are pretty old specs, and you would see more bang for your buck with even a stock i7-4xxx pc from Costco.

Something like i7-4770k or 4790k, 16-32GB ram, R9-290x would be a pretty cheap performer machine in Vegas. Most disk drives are capable of keeping up with multi-stream AVCHD consumer products.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 6/30/2015, 9:21 PM
When I bought my NVIDIA Quadro 4000 I had an old Q6600 CPU. Much to my surprise, on the side of the box it said that it required a Core i-Series CPU (no where was this posed on their web site). I put it in my computer away and I did see a benefit over my old GeForce 8600GT series card. When I finally upgraded to a Core i7 and moved the Quado 4000 over it performed much better. I'm not sure if the PCIe 1.0 or the Q6600 was holding it back (or both) but I did get a benefit, just not as much as when I had PCIe 2.0 and a Core i7 processor.

So you may see a benefit, but don't get something too new or your CPU just won't be able to feed it fast enough. It's best to keep your system balanced for best performance.

~jr