falter
Veteran Member
I've no problem spending on vintage hardware, but when it comes to the current stuff I'm notoriously cheap and usually subsist on castoffs. However while doing my Altair video I finally reached the limits of my patience with the GTX 1650 I've had for 2 years - working on the timeline in Premiere with a 4k video, especially with animations and such, became an absolute battle, with the machine locking up every hour or so and the preview window crashing.
I haven't bought a brand new video card for myself since an Nvidia 570 I think. I had a credit with my distributor so that helped some. Man, what a stressful experience though. I didn't realize NVIDIA had gone over to the Dark Side in the minds of PC gamers. I found the multitude of options and price differences super confusing. I couldn't make myself spend almost two grand on a 4080, much less three or four on a 4090, so I went with a 4070Ti. A lot of reviewers have dumped on the 4070 as too expensive, not enough VRAM, but I felt kind of hemmed in because there was a substantial difference between this card and a 4060, and the next jump up (to a 4080) was another $800. From what I gathered via user benchmarks the 4080's real world performance was only about a third better than the Ti.
I did think about grabbing a second hand 3090... but the main place I see those is second hand on Facebook marketplace and they get snapped up long before I see them. And they're going for $1000, which is what the 4070Ti goes for. Benchmarks suggest the 4070Ti outperforms the 3090 by about 25-30%, although it has half the VRAM.
Anyway, I had to replace the PSU with an 850w, and it came with the new PCIe 5.0 header so I didn't need to adapt anything.. overall, the new card seems pretty decent. I can work with complex bits on my Premiere timeline and it's SO much smoother and less crash prone than before. I actually kept track of my hours doing the Altair video, it ended up being around 80 hours of work (it's earned $450 in ad revenue so far, about $5.60 per hour, my old dishwashing wage, lol). I would bet 25% of that was due to the horrifically slow speed of my rig. I did a test render of that video and it was a mere 45 minutes vs the previous 4.25 hours. That's awesome. Not sure why the HP Envy is beating it by ten minutes despite a 'lesser' card (that's another thing I learned with NVIDIA, newer isn't necessarily better sometimes).. I'm thinking the i9 is beating my Ryzen 5 2600.
Don't know if I made the 'right' choice, but this is definitely better than what I had before, no doubt at all. Not really sure what I should tackle next. I was looking at more powerful Ryzen chips but the performance difference compared to mine, if benchmarks are to be believed, aren't that massive.. like 30% faster for a Ryzen 9 5900X. That doesn't feel like a whole lot for the money spent.
I haven't bought a brand new video card for myself since an Nvidia 570 I think. I had a credit with my distributor so that helped some. Man, what a stressful experience though. I didn't realize NVIDIA had gone over to the Dark Side in the minds of PC gamers. I found the multitude of options and price differences super confusing. I couldn't make myself spend almost two grand on a 4080, much less three or four on a 4090, so I went with a 4070Ti. A lot of reviewers have dumped on the 4070 as too expensive, not enough VRAM, but I felt kind of hemmed in because there was a substantial difference between this card and a 4060, and the next jump up (to a 4080) was another $800. From what I gathered via user benchmarks the 4080's real world performance was only about a third better than the Ti.
I did think about grabbing a second hand 3090... but the main place I see those is second hand on Facebook marketplace and they get snapped up long before I see them. And they're going for $1000, which is what the 4070Ti goes for. Benchmarks suggest the 4070Ti outperforms the 3090 by about 25-30%, although it has half the VRAM.
Anyway, I had to replace the PSU with an 850w, and it came with the new PCIe 5.0 header so I didn't need to adapt anything.. overall, the new card seems pretty decent. I can work with complex bits on my Premiere timeline and it's SO much smoother and less crash prone than before. I actually kept track of my hours doing the Altair video, it ended up being around 80 hours of work (it's earned $450 in ad revenue so far, about $5.60 per hour, my old dishwashing wage, lol). I would bet 25% of that was due to the horrifically slow speed of my rig. I did a test render of that video and it was a mere 45 minutes vs the previous 4.25 hours. That's awesome. Not sure why the HP Envy is beating it by ten minutes despite a 'lesser' card (that's another thing I learned with NVIDIA, newer isn't necessarily better sometimes).. I'm thinking the i9 is beating my Ryzen 5 2600.
Don't know if I made the 'right' choice, but this is definitely better than what I had before, no doubt at all. Not really sure what I should tackle next. I was looking at more powerful Ryzen chips but the performance difference compared to mine, if benchmarks are to be believed, aren't that massive.. like 30% faster for a Ryzen 9 5900X. That doesn't feel like a whole lot for the money spent.
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