Recommended GPU?
- Thread starter snakyjake
- Start date
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If you are not doing any gaming or 3d type work just about any cheap card will do. something like this: PNY GT 700 GeForce GT 730 DirectX 12 (feature 11_0) VCGGT7301D5LXPB 1GB 64-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 Low Profile Ready Video Card - Newegg.com
The high end server/workstation chips pretty much never have built in GPU's. Servers have their own built in VGA (basic, slow) for management. High end workstations use discrete cards. It would be a waste to put iGPU in the E5 chips.
If you're doing video encoding, it isn't a function of the graphics card to determine quality output, it is the encoding settings you use. The task is just offloaded to the graphics card cores for processing. If you will be doing heavy video encoding tasks, I'd recommend a decent graphics card which can help accelerate those tasks significantly over just using your CPU. Which program(s) will you be using?
Something like PNY Nvidia Quadro NVS 295 256MB PCI-E Video Card VCQ295NVS-X16 w/ Warranty comes with a pair of Display Port connectors for ten bucks.
Sorry this is incorrect -Graphics cards/chips have ASICs specifically for encoding built in. They do have quality settings, but you do lose a bit of quality by going ASIC over brute force. Whether this matters to you is entirely up to your use case. If you're doing it professionally I'd urr on the side of caution and push CPU power, if you're doing it for personal use, I'd go for GPU.
The minimum I'd put in a system these days is a 960 gtx.
Not all server / workstation chassis / power supplies have a PCIe power plug. Many allow a PSU upgrade but some use proprietary supplies. The PCIe power plug requirement on a 960GTX may limit the OP.
I put a 750TI in my latest workstation build. They are a great card for the money. I would probably use a 950 if I had to buy new. I tell myself I can see the difference between it and the Quadro it replaced, but probably can't. I agree that a 950/750ti/960( if you have the power plug) is a good minimum for a system you actually work at. But, for "equivalent to the onchip graphics to run mostly headless," the Quadro is a pretty good match.
In the earlier days of encoding via GPU that would be an accurate statement, but as of roughly 2014, GPU's have been able to do the job with the same quality at a faster pace. If you head over to the Adobe forums, there are plenty topics on this with screenshot comparisons. In pretty much any turnkey system provided to professional broadcast companies, they come spec'd with the GPU used for encoding, as recommended by the vendor of the video editing suites. I would do a little more research and not discount it so quickly. Several years back when I worked at a TV studio on some side projects, we would use GPU encoding and not have any visible quality losses. We used Nvidia Quadro cards with EDIUS Pro.
Edit: As an example, you can look at Adobe's performance and quality notes on Adobe Premiere FAQ's in their forums. They note that at medium and high bitrates, the quality when using NVENC-export versus the CPU Mainconcept H264 encoder is the same, but roughly 2-4x faster using NVENC. At low bitrates, you do get some artifacting, but working in a professional environment you will not have to worry about low bit rate video streams.
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