***Please Lock*** Need help choosing a GPU for a workstation

[mike0z]

Hello, I have posted questions about this years ago but I figured I'd get back to it.
I want to buy a pc suitable for both work and videogames.

The best deal that I have seen is a second hand workstation, E5-1650v4 (base 3.6ghz, 6 cores), 500 GB ssd (probably sata), 32 GB ram DDR, Nvidia Quadro P620, 700 W psu.
Price - ~400$

This, in my opinion, is a pretty good deal. I can never get close to this value if I build from scratch. The gpu is going to be swapped of course, but I am not sure what to swap it with. I don't want there to be a big difference in power between the cpu and gpu.

The chipset is the Intel 612, it has a PCIe x16 gen3. The GPU has to have a PCIe Gen 3, because why pay for a newer one when you can't capitalize off of the newer gen 4 & 5? I understand almost everything about the specs when buying a computer but I have no clue about GPU's, since the naming is odd and the market has been chaotic.

The only downside that I have thought about is stability and upgradability. But this second hand workstation is not used a lot, I think its an original build with no parts swapped. And about upgradability , push comes to shove and I can always put in a better Xeon.

My questions are -

Can you build a better PC for the price of 400$ without the gpu innitialy?
Which GPU would you combo with the Xeon so there is no bottleneck? Any benchmark vids?
Any other ideas and concerns about gaming on a workstation?

Thank you in advance!

[Wichtelman]

this xeon is pretty similiar to a ryzen 5 1600x

[Illusion of Progress]

Agree with the above, it's a Haswell refresh-based architecture with 6 cores so it's pretty close to a first generation Ryzen.

I'd say the price is about right or even a bit high, but as you noted, you won't be able to compete with it building new from scratch.

Forget trying to "avoid bottlenecks". You can't. There always is one. Any graphics card that WOULD be fast enough to be a severely questionable pairing with that CPU is, going by the budget of the PC you're looking at, probably so expensive that it is likely beyond your budget and thus isn't likely to be something you'll end up doing anyway.

So my advice is to get the best graphics card you can within your budget.

I'd also scrap the idea of forcing yourself to only look at PCI Express 3.0 options. The link speed a GPU CAN communicate with the CPU at is totally separate from what the GPU WILL process on its own, and what amount that link bandwidth it will use. Don't fall into that trap. PCI Express bandwidth is so far ahead of what GPUs often use in gaming so by looking at PCI Express 3.0 options, you are only accomplishing artificially limiting yourself to older and slower options.

[mike0z]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Illusion of Progress:

Agree with the above, it's a Haswell refresh-based architecture with 6 cores so it's pretty close to a first generation Ryzen.

I'd say the price is about right or even a bit high, but as you noted, you won't be able to compete with it building new from scratch.

Forget trying to "avoid bottlenecks". You can't. There always is one. Any graphics card that WOULD be fast enough to be a severely questionable pairing with that CPU is, going by the budget of the PC you're looking at, probably so expensive that it is likely beyond your budget and thus isn't likely to be something you'll end up doing anyway.

So my advice is to get the best graphics card you can within your budget.

I'd also scrap the idea of forcing yourself to only look at PCI Express 3.0 options. The link speed a GPU CAN communicate with the CPU at is totally separate from what the GPU WILL process on its own, and what amount that link bandwidth it will use. Don't fall into that trap. PCI Express bandwidth is so far ahead of what GPUs often use in gaming so by looking at PCI Express 3.0 options, you are only accomplishing artificially limiting yourself to older and slower options.

so you are saying a budget card wouldn't outrun the CPU by far, ok
But by that logic, why look at newer cards with PCIe gen 4, even if the PCIe gen doesn't matter? Gen 3 cards will do just fine or no, isn't it cheaper? Which GPU would you recommend?
Also do any of these bottleneck calculators online actually work? Can we use those to figure it out? For example, I saw some people pairing the CPU with a GTX 2060, but it shows a slight 6% bottleneck on the calculator.

[Wichtelman]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από m1ke0z:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Illusion of Progress:

Agree with the above, it's a Haswell refresh-based architecture with 6 cores so it's pretty close to a first generation Ryzen.

I'd say the price is about right or even a bit high, but as you noted, you won't be able to compete with it building new from scratch.

Forget trying to "avoid bottlenecks". You can't. There always is one. Any graphics card that WOULD be fast enough to be a severely questionable pairing with that CPU is, going by the budget of the PC you're looking at, probably so expensive that it is likely beyond your budget and thus isn't likely to be something you'll end up doing anyway.

So my advice is to get the best graphics card you can within your budget.

I'd also scrap the idea of forcing yourself to only look at PCI Express 3.0 options. The link speed a GPU CAN communicate with the CPU at is totally separate from what the GPU WILL process on its own, and what amount that link bandwidth it will use. Don't fall into that trap. PCI Express bandwidth is so far ahead of what GPUs often use in gaming so by looking at PCI Express 3.0 options, you are only accomplishing artificially limiting yourself to older and slower options.

so you are saying a budget card wouldn't outrun the CPU by far, ok
But by that logic, why look at newer cards with PCIe gen 4, even if the PCIe gen doesn't matter? Gen 3 cards will do just fine or no, isn't it cheaper? Which GPU would you recommend?
Also do any of these bottleneck calculators online actually work? Can we use those to figure it out? For example, I saw some people pairing the CPU with a GTX 2060, but it shows a slight 6% bottleneck on the calculator.

personally i ignore the bottleneck calculators as there are too many factors to skew the result...
the gpu depends on the resolution and games you want to play and how much you want to spend max... i think you can get decent deals of full second hand i7 or ryzen systems including gpu for around 400$ but we are talking about gtx 1060 6gb or rx 580 8gb gpu range there... i think 400$ for that xeon with that 80$ quadro is no good deal but maybe my second hand market is better than yours...

[mike0z]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Wichtelman:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από m1ke0z:

so you are saying a budget card wouldn't outrun the CPU by far, ok
But by that logic, why look at newer cards with PCIe gen 4, even if the PCIe gen doesn't matter? Gen 3 cards will do just fine or no, isn't it cheaper? Which GPU would you recommend?
Also do any of these bottleneck calculators online actually work? Can we use those to figure it out? For example, I saw some people pairing the CPU with a GTX 2060, but it shows a slight 6% bottleneck on the calculator.

personally i ignore the bottleneck calculators... the gpu depends on the resolution and games you want to play and how much you want to spend max... i think you can get decent deals of full second hand i7 or ryzen systems including gpu for around 400$ but we are talking about gtx 1060 6gb or rx 580 8gb gpu range there...

thank you!

I also wanted to ask about a monitor. Does it have to be more than 144hz for refresh rate? Any other specs, prices?

[Illusion of Progress]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από m1ke0z:

so you are saying a budget card wouldn't outrun the CPU by far, ok
But by that logic, why look at newer cards with PCIe gen 4, even if the PCIe gen doesn't matter? Gen 3 cards will do just fine or no, isn't it cheaper? Which GPU would you recommend?
Also do any of these bottleneck calculators online actually work? Can we use those to figure it out? For example, I saw some people pairing the CPU with a GTX 2060, but it shows a slight 6% bottleneck on the calculator.

What I'm saying is if two GPUs were priced similarly, one is GPU A and is PCI Express 3.0 and gives baseline performance, and one is GPU B and is PCI Express 4.0 but offers 15% more performance, then there's no reason to skip on the latter just because it's a higher PCI Express version.

The PCI Express version just sets the established linked bandwidth cap between the CPU and GPU. That's it. It doesn't change actual GPU processing speed. And since most things don't come anywhere close to saturating the bandwidth between CPU and GPU, well... it's therefore pointless to choose something objectively slower just to "match" them.

Obviously, a PCI Express 3.0 GPU might be fine. I'm just saying there's no reason to limit your options only to them.

The only exception to this might be with a Radeon 6400 or 6500 series in very old computers (PCI Express 2.0 and such), as those two GPUs have very few lanes but are fast enough to where they may lack a lot of needed bandwidth in those cases. But even then, the slower CPUs in such systems with PCI Express versions that old will also be limiting performance too.

And yes, bottleneck calculators are a ridiculous concept. I'd pay them no mind. You can't average that down to a single number. PC loads are far too variable for that.

[Wichtelman]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από m1ke0z:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Wichtelman:

personally i ignore the bottleneck calculators... the gpu depends on the resolution and games you want to play and how much you want to spend max... i think you can get decent deals of full second hand i7 or ryzen systems including gpu for around 400$ but we are talking about gtx 1060 6gb or rx 580 8gb gpu range there...

thank you!

I also wanted to ask about a monitor. Does it have to be more than 144hz for refresh rate? Any other specs, prices?

no it does not have to be but i does not hurt if the resolution or refreh rate is higher... just tell us your max budget for the full system for our recomendations...

[mike0z]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Wichtelman:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από m1ke0z:

thank you!

I also wanted to ask about a monitor. Does it have to be more than 144hz for refresh rate? Any other specs, prices?

no it does not have to be but i does not hurt if the resolution or refreh rate is higher... just tell us your max budget for the full system for our recomendations...

I'd say, 400$ max without the GPU
GPU - 200$ max

I don't know what the monitor needs to have or what different specs and technologies there are, but 150-175$ max. If it can be 144hz for that price, I'd be happy.
I also just saw that some cheap 144hz monitors have stuff like amd freesync capabilities, maybe we should pair that up with an amd card for an example? Or the same with nvidia, dunno how it works.

[Wichtelman]

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/r7gqC6

thats new parts so i guess you can do a lot better with second hand...

[Omega]

This is a very reasonable system, you can safely drop in any modern GPU within your price range. Something like an Nvidia RTX 3060 or AMD RX 6750 XT.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Don't really need to use XEON anymore; something like a Ryzen 5700X or 5900X will easily stomp all those XEON into the ground and provide you with performance on-par with 2nd Gen AMD ThreadRipper stuff. The only major differences might be the lack of Quad Channel RAM.

Modern RTX 30 and 40 series GPU can easily do the work of the outdated Quadro/Titan stuff. This is why NVIDIA now provides "Studio" Driver packages for the GTX 900 series and newer GPUs. This is a driver that unleashes the ASync Computing related power of the NVIDIA consumer GPU so there is no longer a need to use Quadro or Titan

[Introverted Gamer]

You wanna stick with Nvidia for Workstations

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Yea anything that could use CUDA, CAD, 3D-Rendering = use NVIDIA

[Introverted Gamer]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Bad 💀 Motha:

Yea anything that could use CUDA, CAD, 3D-Rendering = use NVIDIA

You can still do it on Radeon GPU, but your on your own to do anything. Be prepared to spend countless time and headaches on Programming trying to get one single program to work.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Introverted Gamer:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Bad 💀 Motha:

Yea anything that could use CUDA, CAD, 3D-Rendering = use NVIDIA

You can still do it on Radeon GPU, but your on your own to do anything. Be prepared to spend countless time and headaches on Programming trying to get one single program to work.

Hmm yea... and who the F wants to do that.

NVIDIA RTX just works, period.
GameReady Driver if you are doing Gaming or non-Workstation stuff.
Studio Driver if you are doing Workstation stuff.