April 5, 2019

Graphics Upgrade

Last month, when I bought my Ryzen build parts, I also picked up a great deal on a used ASUS GTX 760 graphics card. It arrived today!

I was pretty happy with the condition it arrived in. Very clean. No dust buildup in the fins of the cooler or anything! I was expecting it to need some cleaning at least.

I admittedly was going to wait until my Arctic Silver 5 arrived tomorrow, and pull it apart and give it some fresh paste, but I’m impatient. So I fired it up tonight to test it out a little.

This card may have been released in late 2013, but it sure does give the Ryzen 3 2200G a boost over the integrated graphics!

I did have some troubles though. The current nVidia drivers DO NOT play nice with Davinci Resolve 15 on my rig. It simply wouldn’t load with the drivers installed. I remedied that situation by rolling back to the old 399.x.x series from the 419.x.x drivers. The 417 series wasn’t any better. Resolve just hung on the loading screen with CPU usage sitting between 50 and 70%, but not doing anything.

Anyway, got that sorted, Resolve is working, and in my test clip that uses particle emitters to slow things to a crawl in rendering, it shaved another 20-30 seconds off render times. Not bad. The only place for me to go from here is a more powerful (MOAR CORES!!) CPU. One day. At any rate, the same clip when from 10+ minutes on my old laptop to around 2:35 with the 2200G integrated graphics, to 2:10 with the GTX 760 in place. And there is a noticeable improvement in timeline scrubbing. So I’m happy with that.

I have only had time to do a quick Unigine Heaven 4 run, and here are the before and after results:

The integrated Vega 8 graphics aren’t the worst …

But the 5 year old GTX 760 almost fully DOUBLES the performance!

Not bad for $60CAD!! Not bad at all.

Now, let’s see if I pull it apart tomorrow night and re-paste it. It was only hitting 61-63 degrees in benchmarks. So I’m not too worried about the thermals right now.