Originally Posted By: eddie1261
Many times a performance issue can be remedied with a better graphics card. I have an Nvidia Gforce with 2GB of RAM and it's too slow. Right now just viewing a TV stream and being on the web I am using 67% of the GPU. If I open another window I will be sharing that with yet another task and all 3 will run with jitters.

My problem is that I need 4 HDMI outputs and a card to fit into a PCIe slot that won't cost me more than my car did.

Simon, you are a good "hardware nerd" source! I really need a better graphics card but it's tough finding anything that meets what I laid out above. I run 3 monitors so I need HDMI ports for them. And at least 16GB of RAM. And fit into that PCIe slot. That combination is hard to find.

Good luck!










Ok ok, I'll try! What exact model of video card do you have right now? And from the pic you shared is the important part that it's a low-profile card or that the PCIe slot is a short single-lane slot?

The fastest low-profile video card I can find is an Nvidia GT 1030 with 2gb vram, and none of those have more than two outputs. One thing to keep in mind is that a 2gb card is fine for most desktop use, and what you're seeing as "67% of the GPU" is likely the actual graphics processor, not the graphics memory. With any video card, if you run out of video memory the computer will start to use system memory, which is still pretty fast.

With a single-lane slot, that's severely restricting the bandwidth to and from the card. The interesting thing about those types of PCIe slots is that you can technically put a full-size card in them, if you cut away the plastic part of the slot that stops the card from fitting (and there aren't other components next to the slot that would interfere) - this actually works, though it forces the video card to use only one PCIe lane (or however many the slot has), so it's typically not a high-performance solution. In this case, I'd replace the motherboard with one that can take a full x16 card.

I work here