Can anyone suggest a good CUDA enabled card?

[djfonti]

Hello all.

I have a low budget, say £35, and I wish to purchase a CUDA enabled Nvidia card.

I have recently upgraded my CPU to an amd athlon 64 x2 5600, and whilst this has made a vast improvement on 1080p file playback, it is still falling just shy of perfect playback.

I am going to buy CoreAvc and hope to pair it with such a card to help with decoding of HD video.

Ideally I would like the following

cheap card
HDMI/HDCP (not imperative but would be nice)
bluray/hd file acceleration

I have a PCI-E x16 slot and I am soon going to buy a Corsair CX400 PSU to power the card.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[namuk]

8 series cards and above CUDA GPUs.

 

[EndlessWaves]

Which basically means anything you can find new almost certainly supports CUDA.

If you want blu-ray/hd acceleration (which is seperate from CUDA) then going for the latest one would be a good idea. I don't think nVidia has launched their budget 400 series card yet so you're looking at the G 210 or GT 220

 

[djfonti]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I looked at a 8800GTS 320mb but having read up on it aparently a lot of people are having trouble with HD playback on it, although this was last year so who knows.

Would a card like this do the job?

GF210 512M Novatech GeForce 210 512MB GDDR2 VGA/DVI PCI-Express - Retail with PhysX, CUDA & 3D Stereo 589MHz Core, 1402MHz Shader, 512MB 800MHz GDDR2 Memory, 16 Cuda Cores, 1yr Warranty : novatech.co.uk


....or this?

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/...gt210series/Asus/EN210SILENTDI512MD2(LP).html

 

[Deadringers]

to be honest mate any cheap graphics card will do blu-ray.

you only need to spend any kind of money when you want to do some gaming at high resolutions while still turning up all the graphics.

any of these should do the trick just fine:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Shop/Computer-Hardware/All/GPU-NVIDIA/NVIDIA-Geforce-210-PCI-E-(16-Cores)

 

[djfonti]

Thanks Deadringers.

That link brings up the same card as the one I suggested, XFX 210 512mb. I will probably go with this as it is also the one Endless Waves suggested.

Just a quick question. A lot of these cards have the same name and specs, but different manufacturers, like Asus and Zotac. The prices also differ, some have fans and some have heatsinks. Are there any actual differences in terms of performance in these cards?

Could I get a cheap G 210 or would it make a difference getting one £10-15 more?

 

[Deadringers]

hmm really they are the same cards from Nvidia but they have sold the "chipset" design to the manufactures like Asus who then customise it to how they like.

when you get further up the ranks of cards it is nice to have a card from a manufacture like ASUS who have proven themselves over and over again.

But for your needs and if I were in the same position I would be inclined to get the cheapest one there mate.

at that price range they will all perform the same and have the same basic warranty.

 

[djfonti]

Ok then, thanks for the suggestions, I am going to go with a 210. I'll have to order the Corsair PSU first and attempt to install that (that should be interesting ) then I'll get that card.

Thanks everyone once again.

 

[Deadringers]

just get out your Motherboard manual mate and they usually have a diagram showing you which connections are for what.

good luck and post back here if you need any help.

 

[djfonti]

I most certainly will, one wrong move and the whole system will be up in smoke but I will definitely read up on it thoroughly.

Thanks for the help.

 

[EndlessWaves]

I looked at a 8800GTS 320mb but having read up on it aparently a lot of people are having trouble with HD playback on it, although this was last year so who knows.

No wonder, it was released in 2006 and has been discontinued for at least three years. It's an old high end card and would have used a fair chunk of power so would have been horribly inefficient even if it had worked.

Just a quick question. A lot of these cards have the same name and specs, but different manufacturers, like Asus and Zotac. The prices also differ, some have fans and some have heatsinks. Are there any actual differences in terms of performance in these cards?

Could I get a cheap G 210 or would it make a difference getting one £10-15 more?

They may have different clock speeds and memory types and speeds which will influence CUDA performance slightly, although nowhere near what the 30% increase in price would suggest so at this price range it's largely whether the cooler is quiet enough and what's the warranty like.

 

[djfonti]

Cheers EW.

I have found a silent version of the G210 (has a heatsink, no fan) and it has a two year warranty which seems like plenty for a low end card.

 

[Deadringers]

yep should do you fine mate.

but just make sure you have enough air-flow in your case.

few good pointers are to tidy up the cables and make sure nothing is in the way of the fans.

 

[Bossworld]

The GT210 can't deinterlace HD video effectively (according to reviews), so I spent the extra on a GT220 for that reason. Bearing in mind i'm running an older non-dual core CPU, but the 210 is only marginally better than the very old 8400GS.

If you don't need it to be half height, you can probably get a cheaper price than this one I bought

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...shader-1360mhz-48-cores-d-sub-dvi-hdmi-remote

(think I paid nearly £70 )

The 8800GT cards don't have the PureVideo hardware decoding that cards such as the 8500GT had, because it was presumed they were powerful enough not to need it.

 

[djfonti]

yep should do you fine mate.

but just make sure you have enough air-flow in your case.

few good pointers are to tidy up the cables and make sure nothing is in the way of the fans.

Will do

The GT210 can't deinterlace HD video effectively (according to reviews), so I spent the extra on a GT220 for that reason. Bearing in mind i'm running an older non-dual core CPU, but the 210 is only marginally better than the very old 8400GS.

If you don't need it to be half height, you can probably get a cheaper price than this one I bought

Scan.co.uk: Asus 1GB Bravo GeForce GT 220 DDR2 NVIDIA Graphics Card - BRAVO 220 SILENT/DI/1GD2(LP)

(think I paid nearly £70 )

The 8800GT cards don't have the PureVideo hardware decoding that cards such as the 8500GT had, because it was presumed they were powerful enough not to need it.

Unfortunately this is more than I am looking to spend. I don't need it half height but I wouldn't know where to look for a regular one or whether it would be that much cheaper. Thanks for the info though.

 

[rorackowe]

9500GT should be able to fully de interlace, will support purevideo, maybe will do CUDA (not sure!).

videocardshop | PV-T95G-UDF3

GDDR3 should have enough memory bandwidth to do a good job of de-interlacing. Is low video ram for any gaming though.

For me it was this or a GT240 (wanted nvidia), many gt220 have pretty low memory bandwidth although they do support nvidia's 3d implementation FWIW.

 

[Deadringers]

hmm I dont know what to believe here...

my crappy laptop (2 years old) with built in graphics (not any fancy mobile offering from ATI or Nvidia) can playback video no problem, high def stuff also.

and these graphics cards cannot play video right?

 

[djfonti]

Thanks again for the further suggestions.

I am with Deadringers though. I am a little confused.

Basically my understanding was that the whole CUDA implementaion was cards that decode video or at least some of it to offload the pressure on the CPU, as long as the software you used took advantage of it.

My old Sempron 3500+ CPU simply wasn't up to the task, buy my new dual core has made massive strides alone and is almost there (the audio and video are miliseconds apart, you might get the odd glitch here and there).

So I feel if a graphics card and software correctly set up were to do some of the work then I would be set, no....?

 

[Deadringers]

Thanks again for the further suggestions.

I am with Deadringers though. I am a little confused.

Basically my understanding was that the whole CUDA implementaion was cards that decode video or at least some of it to offload the pressure on the CPU, as long as the software you used took advantage of it.

My old Sempron 3500+ CPU simply wasn't up to the task, buy my new dual core has made massive strides alone and is almost there (the audio and video are miliseconds apart, you might get the odd glitch here and there).

So I feel if a graphics card and software correctly set up were to do some of the work then I would be set, no....?

Thats how I always thought of it mate...
would have thought that even with crap drivers these GPUs would have enough power to playback video and HD video.

it isnt exactly a taxing task for it.

my old laptop goes to about 40% CPU usage when playing back video and my PC has 0-1% CPU usage.

Now I would place your pc somewhere in the middle of that with a new GPU so really cannot understand why it would not be able to play back video properly?

 

[EndlessWaves]

Basically my understanding was that the whole CUDA implementaion was cards that decode video or at least some of it to offload the pressure on the CPU, as long as the software you used took advantage of it.

Graphics cards were originally designed for 3d work, hence the name, but they're also great for some other work where many things have to be done in parallel and CUDA, OpenCL and similar are a way of making the graphics processor available to developers in less graphics-specific language.

As far as I understand it most video decoding assistance is provided through a section of DirectX (the standard graphics interface) called DirectX Video Acceleration (DVXA) and doesn't use CUDA at all.