Time for a new video card! Please help.
AnotherUserName
Posts: 2,727
Hi All,
Im getting a break from taxes this year and I thought i'd celebrate with a new video card. This video card would be for rendering primarily. I still do a good amount of gaming when I can but ive always been satisfied with my gtx 770 in that regards so gaming dosent need to be a key concern. I want to keep my budget between 500- 600 bucks. I would also need a new power supply so that also has to fall into the 5-600 dollar range. Im running windows 8.1 and my processor is an intel core i7-5820k. What else do I need to take into consideration? Also, im wondering if I should focus on a single card or would it be better to get two smaller cards (possibly two more gtx 770's)? Is there such a thing as a triple card set-up? Also, is the videocard market still suffering from inflated prices? Should I wait for a price drop?
Thanks for the help!
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
There is still a shortage of graphics cards, but if you check frequently at Newegg, they have had some more reasonable prices recently on a few models - but not for long. Gave up checking the NVIDA site for a 1080 or 1070 reference card.
My interim solution was to low bid on EVGA Titan X (12 GB vram) cards on Ebay. By careful and patient bidding, people are picking them up from highly-rated sellers for from ~$400-$600, although they are going for as much as $1000 for some unknown reason. I ended up with a water-cooled model for a bit over $400 that is all I need for now. The 12GB of vram should be great for IRAY. Folks in this forum have reported that the Titan x is about as fast as a GTX 1070 for IRAY rendering, but it has 12GB vram vs. 8GB for the 1070. Keep in mind that the "Titan X Hybrid" comes with a complete sealed liquid cooling system, while the "Titan X Hydro Copper" includes only the cooling block, and you will have to supply your own pump, coolant reservoir, fan and radiator. The regular Titan X comes with an air cooler.
The Titan X has significantly higher power consumption compared to the current 1xxx series, and this makes it unattractive to crypo-miners. So keep in mind when you shop for a new power supply that the card pulls about 250 watts by itself.
A lot of recent motherboards will handle two or even three graphics cards, but for IRAY rendering the amount of VRAM is at least as important as the number of CUDA cores. I thought about putting two spare GTX 970's in a machine for IRAY, and while it would render pretty fast, with only 4GB vram, it would only handle relatively simple scenes before IRAY dropped to CPU mode.
I thought this would still be an issue. Thats kind of why I thought that I might just double up what I currently have, seems like a cheap-ish option, and wait for the prices to recover. All I can find are refurbished cards though (for my current card).
Does anyone know anything about these cards? EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SC GAMING, ACX 2.0 (Single Fan), 6GB GDDR5, DX12 OSD Support (PXOC), 06G-P4-6163-KR . They seem to be reasonably priced(?).
I'm running 2 of them in an old clunker of a PC & they can render faster than my Modern gaming PC with a single 1070
I was happy with my 970 tbh but was running into memory issues with them being only 4 gig & they kept dropping to cpu render
Hi derren_c, thats the issue im running into these days, plenty of memory issues. So it sounds like its a good foundation for a double card setup, nice. I'll look into it more. Thanks.
Do dual cards double the amount of vram? If I have two 4gb cards and both are the same variety of cards, does that mean that I get 8 gb of vram?
Unfortunately, no, vram is not additive, except for some really high-end NVIDIA cards.
Is there any advantage to having a duel card setup?
..the only advantage is that you have more cores which will reduce render time to a degree, but that is about it. If you also game then it will help improve frame rate.
Ok, I think I get it now. The more vram I have, the more models I can render on scene, cutting down on composite work. The more Cuda cores, the faster the render completes.
...that's it.
The higher end cards Greymom mentioned about are two Quadro ones that make use of a new linking interface called NVLink which allows for memory pooling between cards. These are very expensive with the Quadro GP100 (16 GB) priced at around 7,200$ and the Volta GV100 (32 GB) at 8,900$. Not sure if Daz will even support Volta as it only is being reserved for the latest Quadro and Tesla compute series. To get the full advantage requires two NVLink widgets at 450$ each.
The successors to the Pascal GTX series will be built on the new Turing architecture which will also incorporate faster GDDR6 memory (so no HBM2 yet). These will also continue to use the normal SLI connection though there is some discussion of possibly a 16 GB card.
Since the new Nvidia cards are supposed to arrive in July, you may want to wait and see what they offer. If nothing else, they may drop the prices for current cards. With your budget, you should definitely get at least 8 Gb of RAM, so a 1070, 1070ti, or 1080. If your total budget for GPU and power supply is $500, then you may want to consider the 1060 6Gb.
The important thing is what kind of scenes do you render? A zillion cuda cores won't help if your scene always drops to CPU because of RAM.
Wow, id like to see what rendering a large scene on one of those computers is like. Id expect it to be really quick.
Hmmm, more waiting
. That does make sense though. Id hate to buy something only to see a price drop soon after.
Id like more ram and more cores. I basically render small scenes but thats only because of card limitations. Id like to do bigger scenes but due to composite and render times, I typically dont.
i second kitsumo's recommendation. wait until the new generation drops and give that time to sink in to the market before you spend. you'll be glad you did, if my own experience is any kind of guideline.
also, if you decide to go for a new card, make sure that the new card has drivers that support iray, and that studio is caught up with the generational tech-leap thing. it took nvidia dev a surprising amount of time to deliver drivers that supported new pascal-architecture cards. you'd think they'd have had that all sorted out before release, but no, nope, they way did not.
j
If you're thinking about spending $1,100-$1,200 for a graphics card and a power supply, you should just buy a new computer. For about $300-400 more, you could get a GTX 1070 or 1080 with 16-32 Gb of ram, and a 7th or 8th gen Intel CPU.
Well I think it would be smart to wait. I suppose that during that time I could always put some more cash aside (daz budget) and see how much of a fund I can come up with. Possibly enough for an even better card? The thought of a new computer is also interesting...
Just a note. I'm running dual 1080s on my laptop (yeah it was pricey). Along with others, I can vouch that having twice the number of CUDA cores does reduce your IRAY render times by about half, unless the render goes CPU only of course (i.e. scene won't fit in 6.4 GB of available VRAM of each card, each card has to hold the entire scene). Note that Windows 10 reserves around 18% of the available VRAM for no really useful purpose... for smaller cards this might make sense, but the percentage of the VRAM reserved by Windows 10 remains the same, unless (so I hear) if you get a Quadro card, which is probably out of your price range anyways...
Earlier editions of Windows aren't as greedy in this regard.
Just something to keep in mind.
...I did so back in the Core2 Quad days to wait for the i7 and was not disappointed. Sadly that CPU is no longer supported by Intel however I now have a 6 core Xeon in it's place.
...but be stuck with W10 which reserves about 18% of your VRAM, so that 8 GB card leaves you with with about 6.6 GB for rendering.
Am I going to have compatibility issues with an i7?
...no. My old I7 930 would support a Pascal card. The MB is PCIe 2.0 but that just means a little more time to load the scene into VRAM, other than that, it doesn't affect render performance (will be installing a Maxwell Titan X soon).
Thank you everyone for the help. I think I have enough ideas to go on now.
Anyone have a preference as far as manufacturers are concerned? Im leaning towards evga but thats only because they are the only brand that ive used before. Asus, Msi ???
All chips are the same. A 1070 reference card has the same chip as an EVGA, which has the same chip as a MSI. That said, the big difference is the coolers, and sometimes the warranty. I have an EVGA FTW 1070 and a reference 1070, they do the same work, but the EVGA is much nicer looking, and runs a LOT cooler. This really, for the most part, comes down to what you like the looks of the most, as well as price. I actually piced up the founders edition cards I have because they were in stock at a local best buy for $350 last month. Scooped up two of them. I was running the EVGA in my main PC and an ASUS 1050 ti in my secondary PC. Since I got the two founders edition cards i now have them both running in my main, along with the 1050 and put the EVGA in my second PC. There is a fairly dramatic difference in the time it takes me to render between the two computers, so there is that.
As others have said, it may make sense to just wait for the 11 series cards to come out, but I couldn't help myself when I saw those 1070s for $350. Those would be perfect for that budget you have, and you could toss the PSU in there as well and still be below your target.
So while online shopping is usually your best bet, next time you're near a best buy drop in and take a look at their, just might stumble upon a gem.
Thanks brimstoneomega. Cooling is a good enough reason for me to stick with evga just because im paranoid about overheating. Ill wait for the 11 series cards... I dont want to, but I will.
I like the Strix series from Asus; run silent except when rendering.
... And I hear ya; interested in the 11 series, or whatever its called.
NVidia's Computex Keynote is tomorrow (May 29th, 2018) at 7 PM PDT, and will be livestreamed. We will no doubt learn a few things r.e. NVidia's upcoming releases then...
So eagerly awaiting a price drop!
Good luck with that. You and everyone else.
I'll be waiting.