What GPU to buy under £200.00 UK

Hi I currently have a Nvidia GXT 650 installed and getting memory full messages, I'm on Windows 10
i7 Intel, SSD 1T drive PC
What GPU would you recommend for less than £200 to replace it with.
Many thanks Tony

Hi Tony,

FWIW, I am using an nVidia Quadro P4000 with 8GB of VRAM and I also get memory full messages once in a while. My point is that you will probably need to spend quite a bit more than £200 to rid yourself of those messages.

I would be interested to hear from other users still running a GTX 1080 Ti (11 GB VRAM) with Resolve 17 (assuming you could get one of these, perhaps used?) - but even those are insanely expensive (new) at the moment. I'm in Canada and just checked on newegg.ca and those relatively old models are still going for $1500 CAN (which is more like £850).

Maybe these are just COVID-19 numbers (there does seem to be a bit of price gouging these days for many items)...

Steve

I'm also thinking 200 is too low to be worthwhile.

Triple that figure, and you're getting warmer.

Yeah unfortunately from 16.2.7 onwards Resolve started to optimise its base code to take advantage of the NVidia RTX series cards with CUDA capability and high VRAM count - 8GB and above.

So if you have a graphics card that's lower than 10xx, I'd stick with Resolve v16.2.6 and below for the time being.

BMC is not renowned for being backwards compatible though, so I'd work 16.2.6 until you have enough pennies to spring for an 8GB RTX series board that handles CUDA. A lot of the 20xx series prices are starting to fall, especially for used cards, as more and more of the 30xx series becomes widely available and folks upgrade.

Also, you'll probably have better luck, if you're running an NVidia based card, to run the studio driver instead of the game ready one that the NVidia Experience (and website) seems to want you to install every time.

You'd just search for the studio driver that's compatible with the card you already own and install the latest driver version *for that card*.

When the newly released 30 series cards become available, maybe try and up your budget to an Nvidia Geforce 3070, or see if a 2060 (2060 super, or the 2070/super) can be had cheap second hand if budget is a priority. This at least from my relatively light research is where I'm looking (well, new 30 series, new cpu, mobo, hard drives and ram...)

I just went up from a GTX 960 2GB to an RTX 2070 8GB, and the difference was measurable.

But my 2k and 4k timelines were still stuttering etc., in my HPZ820 with twin 24-core CPUs and 64GB RAM - until I nailed down where my system was bottlenecking and that resulted in my swapping all my three operational HDDs out to SSDs:

One 1TB SSD for the Win10 Pro install
One 1TB SSD for the R17b2 projects, caches, database, etc.
One 2TB SSD for the project media alone. I consolidated my previous HDD media onto this one.

Now I'm cooking with gas!
Quite apart from the Z820's fans being by far the noisiest things in the room now!

Very happy and total cost to upgrade was just under $800. Not too shabby for a system that now runs two 27" and one 40" 4k monitor. And smoothly too!

(I kept my original HDDs in there but now they're for backups, tests and little used media I still need on tap, etc.)

When the newly released 30 series cards become available, maybe try and up your budget to an Nvidia Geforce 3070, or see if a 2060 (2060 super, or the 2070/super) can be had cheap second hand if budget is a priority. This at least from my relatively light research is where I'm looking (well, new 30 series, new cpu, mobo, hard drives and ram...)

Yes, a second recommendation for used parts. I recently built my daughter a 4K video editing machine for $500 Canadian ($380 USD). (I already had a MOBO & Monitor but got everything else including power supply and case through Craigslist hunting).

Gamers tend to upgrade at every new technology, so last months cards are plentiful and competition makes em cheap. Gamers' machines are often beefier than we need for editing.. There's great value in used parts these days.

Hear hear - what Rick said!