Maximum PC

Seems the latest/greatest vid cards are for gamers playing 3D games and such. My rig is just a PC/Media rig. Half the time it has me on the net and half the time it's encoding HD for me to watch, usually doing all at the same time.

In the past, I've been getting the BEST vid cards cause with my rig, it has a lot of resposiblity. I could be watching a HD movie on my 42" HDTV while at the same time surfing the web, downloading files and maybe even watching video from YouTube.

A thought came to mind....why don't I get 2 "pretty good" vid cards instead of one top notch vid card?? I could plug the one card into my 42" HDTV which would encode HD movies and whatnot and I could plug the other card into my 26" HD monitor for the internet. The ONLY reason I got such expensive cards was to handle all of the work it had to do but if I got two pretty decent cards......you know what I am saying????

I was hoping members here could give an opinion as to the best option. Running one high end vid card hard, overclocked or two pretty decent vid cards at stock?

^This. Independent GPUs are for gaming. Encoding video uses your CPU and integrated HD4000 graphics can easily handle watching movies/browsing the web.

But, he has an AM3 processor...

The only reason to get a high or mid level GPU is GAMING or 3D Content Creation. Your GPU does not handling any encoding work, all encoding is done on your CPU, & even with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 or newer, the GPU only handles the acceleration of certain effects. This will handle all your needs: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130788

List of GPU accelerated effects in Premiere Pro CS5
Here is a list of the effects and transitions that can be accelerated by CUDA in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 (5.0.3) and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and later.

Alpha Adjust

Basic 3D

Black & White

Brightness & Contrast

Color Balance (RGB)

Color Pass (Windows only)

Color Replace

Crop

Drop Shadow

Edge Feather

Eight-Point Garbage Matte

Extract

Fast Color Corrector

Four-Point Garbage Matte

Gamma Correction

Garbage Matte (4, 8, 16)

Gaussian Blur

Horizontal Flip

Levels

Luma Corrector

Luma Curve

Noise

Proc Amp

RGB Curves

RGB Color Corrector

Sharpen

Sixteen-Point Garbage Matte

Three-way Color Corrector

Timecode

Tint

Track Matte Key

Ultra Keyer

Video Limiter

Vertical Flip

Cross Dissolve

Dip to Black

Dip to White

List of GPU accelerated effects in Premiere Pro CS5.5 and later
Here is a list of the additional effects and transitions that can be accelerated by CUDA in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and later.

Directional Blur

Fast Blur

Invert

Additive Dissolve

Film Dissolve

WOW......are you telling me that $40 card will do all I need? That's the 600 line that ends with the 690 that has 2 GPU's on it and is worth about $1,000.

I want my rig to rock super fast on the internet, download files like fire and watch HDTV on my 42" HDTV at the same time.

I'm running a Radeon 4890 HD w/1GB RAM which runs both TV and monitor. My rig is 3 years old. Man I always thought the vid card handled.......you know, all the video.

Question remains, is it better to have 2 half decent cards or one "mack daddy" card?

Video decoding can be offloaded to the GPU, but it's never clear when it does. Not that it matters, even a pitiful dual-core Atom could handle H.264 @ 1080p these days. Even if you can't do anything else while it's playing video.

Also you want your rig to rock super fast internet? Get a faster internet connection. You can throw in the fastest hardware on the planet, but if you're on 8Mbps, that's all you're getting. On a good day. So think about upgrading your ISP first.