graphics card upgrade

[stuck]

My desktop PC does not have a Win 11 compatible CPU but apart from one thing, it does all that I ask of it so I'm not planning on getting a new machine until Win 10 reaches end-of-life.

The only thing my machine struggles with is when applying a magic noise reduction algorithm within my photo editing application. It takes about 4-5 mins to export a file if I use that feature, because the PC only has on-board Intel graphics. However, if a suitable dedicated graphics card is fitted the application can use GPU on that card and file export times are greatly improved.

After some careful bidding on eBay I eventually got a Nvidia GTX 1050 ti based card at a good price. That card arrived today. It took longer to download the latest driver for it than it did to actually fit the card into the machine but now that everything is installed it's working as expected.

My first test export of a file utilising the GPU on the card took less than 10 seconds.

I can live with await like that

Ken

[HansV]

Great!

[stuck]

Subsequent tests are giving export times of around 30 secs. That's because that first export was of a ~10 MB RAW file from old camera. The files from my current camera are a stiffer challenge as they are ~30 MB.

I can still live with the wait though

Ken

[StuartR]

It's always a surprise when upgrades go so well

[BobH]

Well done, Ken!

[PJ_in_FL]

What's the specs of the main computer? Curious if it's an upgrade that I could also employ.

[stuck]

What's the specs of the main computer? Curious if it's an upgrade that I could also employ.

It's a Dell 9010 mini tower:
CPU is a Intel Core i5 3570 @ 3.40 GHz.
RAM is 8 GB (DDR3)
System drive is a 256 GB Samsung SSD (but I have also have an internal 10 TB Western Digital HDD for all my data, which is mainly photos).
The motherboard has four card slots:
    1 x PCI, 2 x PCI-E and 1x PCI-E Gen 2.
The GTX 1050 ti card has 4 GB DDR5 RAM and is in the PCI-E Gen 2 slot, the others are all empty. Technically the card requires a PCI-E Gen 3 slot so it will be slightly throttled in my system but I don't have any games so that's not a problem. Also, the card is double width so I can't use PCI-E slot that's right next to the Gen 2 slot now, even if I wanted to.

In USD, the price I paid for the card was $82, including delivery.

Ken
PS If you are buying a graphics card from eBay, be aware that some cards listed there have been seriously hammered having been used for cryptomining.

PPS The photo editing software that has benefited from this upgrade is DxO PhotoLab v5

[Jay Freedman]

That's a fantastic price. I recently beat it though -- an NVIDIA GTX 1060 with 6 GB for free.

Spoiler

My son-in-law had it in his PC, and when he upgraded to something better (for upwards of USD$300) he gave it to me.

[stuck]

That's a fantastic price. I recently beat it though -- an NVIDIA GTX 1060 with 6 GB for free...

Once again that just goes to show, it's not what you know, it's who you know

Ken

[John Gray]

If we weren't metric, I would have said that that free graphics card was probably half-inched!