Niche Problem

[redrobin]

Hello LTT Forum!

 

I have a bit of a niche problem on my hands that I would like some buying advice for. I work a lot with 3D modeling/rendering/Stereoscopic 3D rendering in Blender. It's a bit of a hobby of mine, and I'm currently taking classes for it, hence why I'm rendering in stereoscopic. I've currently moved over to GPU rendering over CPU rendering (and it has been a god send). I currently use OpenCL and my R9 380 as a compute GPU for the rendering process. But here is where my problem comes in...

 

I had to save up for a long time for my 380, and I love that card to bits (heh, see what I did there? anyway...). I simply don't want to use it as compute for rendering when I could be gaming with it, and because I don't want to waste cycles and burn my card up because it was expensive. Here's what I need help with: I have a budget of $60, a 550W PSU that's almost at it's limit, and I don't want to buy a more powerful PSU. I need a low-end, budget, single slot, low-power GPU that I can shove in my system to use as compute and compute only so I can use my 380 for "productive" tasks such as gaming while I have a render going so that I'm not sitting idle waiting for it to finish. I'm a Team Red guy, but I honestly don't care if the card comes from AMD or Nvidia (I'd actually like the CUDA support, but OpenCL does just fine). Any recommendations are much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

Keep in mind that it doesn't have to render at blistering speeds, I'd buy a used Titan and a better PSU if I wanted speed, it just needs to take the brunt that my 380 would otherwise be taking.

[Predrag]

hmmm...

60$/50€...

Either you go GT 730 or HD 5770.

[Spartancloud]

3 minutes ago, Predrag said:

hmmm...

60$/50€...

Either you go GT 730 or HD 5770.

I was just going to suggest a GT 730 for that budget, some of them are rated at 23 W so hopefully you have at least that to spare.

[Predrag]

Just now, Spartancloud said:

I was just going to suggest a GT 730 for that budget, some of them are rated at 23 W so hopefully you have at least that to spare.

Yeah, the 5770 eats over a 100W

[redrobin]

Everything is clocked at stock (R9 380, Core i5-4690k) so I wouldn't see why I can't go with the GT 730, assuming the drivers will play nice with each other. Thanks guys, this forum is extremely helpful!