vipR2000

Thanks for the advice. I decided to buy Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 570 / 4GB. There was some sale on amazon and I got it NEW for £110 - £15 cheaper, than the cheapest BUY NOW on ebay (used). It works very quiet. Cheers

Hi. I use custom build silent hackintosh for Lightroom + Photoshop and Hugin for panorama stitching, no games, VR etc. just mail, web browser and photo editing software. The question I have is, which graphics card would be the best for my setup? I narrowed down my choices to AMD (nVidia is not supported in latest macOS) and Sapphire Pulse has good opinions when it comes to noise, but I'm open to any suggestions. Other than performance for the video editing I worry about noice levels and a lifespan. There is a lot of graphics card out there used for mining cryptocurrency, which means they were working under 100% load all the time. No idle, no turned off for the night, just 100% load or even more if OC. Each graphics card would be faster than my integrated graphics. It's an old build (2015) based on i5 4690K and MSI motherboard H97M-G43 Intel LGA1150 H97 Micro ATX Motherboard (4x DDR3, 6x USB3.0, 8x USB2.0, GBE, LAN, HDMI, DVI, DP, VGA). Maxed out memory - 32GB. No graphics card, stock fan and procesor without OC, on factory settings from new in the Fractal Design Define R5 case. SUPER QUIET! I use this computer with 27" Eizo CG 277 monitor (2560x1440) and 21" ViewSonic for portraits (pivot mode @ 1200x1600). I don't plan switching to 4K for now. Recently I tried to upgrade my storage - SSD 850 EVO 1TB by adding M.2 970 EVO also 1TB as a boot drive and I failed. Still trying to sort this out (I ordered PCI Express adapter) but it could be not that easy as I'm thinking about dedicated graphics card, because recently I started editing some videos as well. I use DaVinci Resolve 15, very slow. I considered passive cooling with Palit 1050 Ti but nVidia on mac is not supported that well. So I have to narrow my choice to Radeon. RX 580 with 8GB of RAM would be the fastest option I can consider, but also louder than anything else. I'm not sure if I can benefit from that speed using my config (mother board has one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (PCI_E1, supports x16 speed) and one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot (PCI_E4, supports x4 speed). I'm going to try and find out where my SSD will perform better. I can go for RX 580 4GB, which is cheaper than 8GB, but still pretty fast, RX 570 8GB (slower, should be quieter, same price as 580/4GB) or RX 560 4GB. There are even 2GB options, but that could be a bottle neck for the editing. I guess RX 480 should be also pretty good. Each of these cards is much faster than my built-in Intel Graphics and macOS use acceleration even to draw the interface, so the improvement should be overwhelming no matter what I choose. Price is not that important - all of these cards are available as used on ebay for £80-140 which is very acceptable. Thank you for your advice, vipR