HW decode benchmarks for GTX 650 or similar?

General Support / Questions Hardware Encoding
1

I have an older Nehalem i7 2.8GHz CPU running a variety of media center and transcoding tasks and have started wading into the MCEBuddy waters. It’s quite slow (takes about 75min to scan/recode a 30-min show), and am considering buying the cheapest Kepler card I can find (which is probably a used 1GB GTX 650 card) to speed things up. Before I do I was wondering if anyone had a similar config, or any experience with the GTX 650 that might help get my expectations in order.

2

Wow a GTX 650. that is a blast from the past. While it is technically compatible there are some major limitations.

  1. It is very old and slow as hell.

  2. With such an old card and an i7 cpu, it will probably be slower then what you currently do.

  3. It is an old card with no support for newer formats such as h265 and others.

  4. Did i mention that it is very old and slow.

  5. NEVER BUY USED HARDWARE!!! Hardware goes bad after some time and sellers try to unload their old junk on unsuspecting buyers.

I would recommend a quadro P400. It is a very cheap card that is fast and supports older operating systems and hardware. It is single slot and does not require extra power connectors.

Welcome to the family.

3

Just wanted to bump this old thread to offer some help if someone else is in this situation.

I have a GTX 650 TI Boost.

Yes. It’s an old card.

Yes. There are faster cards out there if you want to pay a fortune on video cards which are highway robbery these days.

In my case my system was not using the graphic card’s perfectly decent hardware transcoding CUDA functions.

MCEbuddy would take, easily, 2 hours to transcode 1 hour of video with all cpu cores at 100%. I knew then hw transcoding was not working.

It wasn’t until I saw an error in the debug log that I realized I needed to update the card’s graphics driver.

Once I did that, a 2 hour transcode dropped to 25 minutes.

My cpu cores were at 34-53% the entire time.

So, to answer this old question, there’s nothing wrong with a GTX 650.

Works perfectly fine, with current drivers, to hw transcode using MCE Buddy.