Graphic card choice

[hargil]

Graphic cards in a vortex 3 with an i7-3720QM & 16 GB RAM


I don’t really have a feel for graphic cards at all.

I am considering two

• 1.5GB GeForce GTX 670M
• 2GB GeForce GTX 675M

But I don’t know if the extra money is worth it for the 675 for my use.
I could better spend the extra money elsewhere.

Could someone advise please.


I do not game

I guess 70% of my time is using Nikon Capture NX (raw photo editing software) or
adobe photoshop elements 10 to edit photos (RAW format mostly – but jpgs as well)


5% of my time (max) edit some home movies using adobe premier


25% Watch internet movies, surf, word processing, excel, c compiling, general ‘stuff’


I don’t think any of this stuff is very demanding, is it?


Would I notice any significant difference with the 675?

Thanks

 

[dangro474]

Hi Hargil,

As you do not game, you would notice absolutely no difference whatsoever between the 670M and 675M.

 

[hargil]

thanks

 

[HonestFlames]

Absolutely go with the cheaper GPU. A 670 is still quite fast, for the time that you decide "to hell with it, I need to play Half Life 2!".

An SSD is a worthier upgrade, for your usage.

 

[hargil]

thanks

i am going with the 120GB INTEL®520 SERIES SSD for the boot drive

and the

750GB MOMENTUS XT HYBRID for the data drive

do you think 16 GB will be enough RAM for video editing along with teh 670?

 

[HonestFlames]

16GB is a heck of a lot of RAM. I think you will be plenty satisfied with performance!

16GB is what I have in my home server, which serves 4 Minecraft servers, a file server, torrents, media server and occasional virtual machine or two. It never runs short.

 

[hargil]

ok thanks

I was not sure how video editing uses ram

if I edit a movie I was not sure it the program loaded it into main ram or the ram on the video card

I thought if it used main ram then the more the better

if I got the whole video clip in ram then that would be faster to edit that constant disc accesses

I think I will stick at 16 GB then

thanks again

 

[HonestFlames]

Video editing usually means dealing with very, very large files. I don't know if video editing software does anything particularly special to use all your RAM to speed things up, but Windows' basic file caching will more than likely make a huge improvement on the actual editing performance, just by its normal behavior of keeping as much file data cached into RAM as it possibly can.