HP Compaq Elite 8300 Tower (QV994AV) video card replacement

[BillHolland]

Hi Paul, I installed the video card today and below are my findings. Installing the driver went with some problems, but in the end it went well. First I got a black screen at startup after the Windows logo (when Windows starts loading drivers). I then turned the PC off and on again and then I did get the Windows login screen. Then the installation crashed for unclear reasons with the error message below. When I restarted the installation software I got the message “There is no Nvidia GPU detected on your system”. I restarted the PC and observed in Device Manager (Display Adapters) that a GTX 1650 driver was loaded. Since the installation did not go well at first, I ran it again and then it went through the whole process without errors.

And now the performance results :-). The encoding of video has become enormously faster. Where encoding a 10 minute video used to take over 3.5 hours (with all CPU cores permanently at 100%), that same video now takes .... 7 minutes. In this, the CPU was running at around 28% (overall utilization) and the GPU at 18% (and almost full memory utilization). Timeline playback also now runs flawlessly and smoothly, even at full playback resolution. That was totally impossible before. However, I have the impression that the GTX 1650 does not have to work hard, or perhaps cannot work hard due to the fact that the PCI Express 3.0 is in a PCI Express 2.0 slot. Another thing I noticed is that the PC hardly takes any more power from the mains than before. With the old video card and all CPU cores at 100% load (ecoding the video from above) it was 90 watts, with the GTX 1650 and that same video it is now 105 watts. Since the specs say the video card can draw 75 watts (at full load), I would have expected even a much bigger perfomance boost (but I'm very happy with this one!). Could there possibly be some tuning so that the GTX 1650 can be addressed more?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Glad the Nvidia card is outperforming the AMD card by a wide margin.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't know how to squeeze more performance out of the video card and recommend that you start a new discussion on that.

Cheers,

Paul

[BillHolland]

Hi Paul, I found the solution. One still has to set Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling in Windows (Settings > System > Display > Graphics Settings and toggle on “Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling). Then you can specify which applications will get which graphics preferences. After this action I see the GPU regularly going to the 80 - 90% range so it is doing well. Again many thanks for your information and help.

By the way: the ASUS website lists an outdated version (V560.81 - 2024/09/03) as the most recent driver. NVidia's website lists the most recent version (V566.36 - 2024/12/10). I initially had the wrong version.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Anytime. 

Glad to have been of assistance. 

That's great news you were able to make some settings changes in Windows to boost the performance of your new graphics card. 

Cheers,

Paul