Upgrade from GTX 950...
Upgrade from GTX 950...
Hi
I'm not a gamer, not at all.
I've used my current PC (Ryzen 5 1600 + GTX 950) to rip DVDs and Blurays from time to time.
I'm thinking about swapping the CPU for a Ryzen 7 5700x once I find a good used deal.
Regarding the GPU, will a GTX 1660 Super improve things and assist with encoding through NVENC? I might have found a used one for $50 (Gigabyte).
Thanks
If AV1 support becomes ineffective, perhaps an A380 could serve as a viable alternative.
AV1 is another video encoding technique that offers great efficiency in terms of file size, though it needs particular hardware or else it becomes quite slow
What is your highest spending limit?
Which model does your power supply unit have?
The only other cards that would be almost identical in encoding quality, but slightly less efficient in performance and power consumption, would be a GTX 1650 Super. It shares the same GTX 16 series Turing encoder as the GTX 1660 Super. The original GTX 1650 uses a more outdated Volta encoder, which is closer in quality to the Pascal encoder found in the GTX 10 series, but both are generally lower in encoding quality than the Turing encoder.
The GTX 1650 Super would be a strong alternative if you aimed to cut costs for used cards and lower power usage, though both would function well with a 450-watt PSU. The difference in TDP between the GTX 1650 Super and 1660 Super is only 25 watts (100 watt versus 125 watt). The 1660 would match the encoding performance and power consumption of the 1660 Super.
Another affordable choice is the GTX 1070, which features dual NVENC encoders (also available in 1080/80 Ti versions) compared to the single encoder in the GTX 16 series. This allows two encodings to run simultaneously at similar speeds to a single encoding on the GTX 1650 Super. The main drawback is the noticeably lower quality of the encoding, and whether that matters to you. It will still be better than your GTX 950 in quality, but likely not significantly so. The GTX 1070 has a 145 watt TDP.
You might also discover a reasonably priced RTX 3050 8GB card with the same encoder as in the RTX 20 series. While it performs slower than an RTX 2060 in games, it remains comparable in NVENC encoding. The RTX 3050 8GB has a 130 watt TDP.