25 May 14, 09:29AM
Regarding drivers and support, you basically only have the choice between AMD and nVidia in general - since they both have unified driver packages (at least for cards that you still can buy). Feel free to roam the forums about which one is better - it's only a war going on about that topic ;)
Regarding the card itself - of course, you can go for the biggest possible - even if that monster then only runs in idle mode most of the time.
If your computer doesn't already sound like a vacuum cleaner, I'd recommend trying to keep noise levels down. I usually go for one of the biggest cards with passive cooling - and then add a fan with low rpm. Upgrading a passive cooler with a fan gives you a quite silent but hugely overpowered cooling system, that will keep chip temperatures very low. That means, the card will run as stable as it can - and probably live forever. Power consumption will be below 70 watts, since that's about as much as can be cooled passively - which means, that basically every power supply will suffice.
You should try to get a card with high memory bandwidth, since otherwise the GPU will waste a lot of time waiting on the memory. Never go for a solution with more than one GPU - that's a waste of everything.
For example, an AMD HD 7750 would be exactly that. GDDR5 RAM with 72GB/sec and 819GFLOPS at 55 watts. The drawback of such a solution is, that you'll need at least three slots room (including the additional fan).
Should be enough for ac. I have no idea, if recording will work - but that may also be an issue of your CPU. I suggest that, if recording is crucial, you need to find someone who has done that already - and succeeded.
Regarding the card itself - of course, you can go for the biggest possible - even if that monster then only runs in idle mode most of the time.
If your computer doesn't already sound like a vacuum cleaner, I'd recommend trying to keep noise levels down. I usually go for one of the biggest cards with passive cooling - and then add a fan with low rpm. Upgrading a passive cooler with a fan gives you a quite silent but hugely overpowered cooling system, that will keep chip temperatures very low. That means, the card will run as stable as it can - and probably live forever. Power consumption will be below 70 watts, since that's about as much as can be cooled passively - which means, that basically every power supply will suffice.
You should try to get a card with high memory bandwidth, since otherwise the GPU will waste a lot of time waiting on the memory. Never go for a solution with more than one GPU - that's a waste of everything.
For example, an AMD HD 7750 would be exactly that. GDDR5 RAM with 72GB/sec and 819GFLOPS at 55 watts. The drawback of such a solution is, that you'll need at least three slots room (including the additional fan).
Should be enough for ac. I have no idea, if recording will work - but that may also be an issue of your CPU. I suggest that, if recording is crucial, you need to find someone who has done that already - and succeeded.