Can anyone help me pick out a budget friendly (sub $200) graphics card?
-
Doesn’t have to be current generation
-
I won’t be gaming at all on the PC
-
Needs to run well on Linux
-
Must run 3 monitors
-
Biggest workout it will get is streaming security cams on one screen, full screen video on another.
-
Power supply is only 295W and I’d rather not upgrade it.
Any help is much appreciated!
Needs to run well on LinuxAMD.
If you don’t mind used, RX 460/560 will do what you need and don’t require any power from a PSU. There are loads of them on Ebay for well under 100. Now that I’m looking, the RX 570s are well below 100 now as well. Good time to get an ultra budget Linux gaming machine built. But those require an 8 pin PSU lead, I believe.
RX580 is usually mentioned as high value. There are various port configurations that include 3 HDMI connections. I have no experience running it myself, but have been doing a bunch of research recently while looking at what to get for a workstation. The 580 comes up a lot.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-radeon-rx-580-8-gb.b5129
And you can get “new” from AliExpress around 80-90€
I have one and I totally agree
I’d just look for a used AMD card (or intel their drivers seem good, but I haven’t seen many tests) that fits your specs
Only consider intel if u r using a full intel pc since not using resizable bar is gonna cost u a %40 performance cut.
AMD supports the same feature.
I would look at one of the lower end Intel Arc GPUs. The support is pretty good at this point, especially if you aren’t gaming. They’re a good value, don’t use much power, and you won’t be missing modern features like AV1 encoding/decoding. Since they’re quite new they should have support for a while.
See what’s on Newegg. Any Intel or AMD based one should do nicely. I would avoid NVIDIA at all costs though.
I’d buy a pre owned card from eBay.
Go with RTX 2070 Super which should be around your price point. If not, then RTX 2070 (not super).
Make sure returns are accepted, and seller has high rating (99%).
are you sure you want to go with an Nvidia card, I’ve had plenty of problems with Nvidia drivers before
Nvidia drivers are fine on Linux. There may be contention with how the are distributed (closed source) but as far as installing them and using them, it’s trivial at the point.
it’s not that they are hard to install, just that they are worse than AMD ones
Not necessarily, I installed them in debian 11 wich still used an old version of xorg, system went to hell and never came back, that was the last time I used nvidia for linux.
Why do I need to struggle? there’s already another option wich cost less money and doesn’t demand my weekend just to make it “work”
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever tried to install the Nvidia drivers on Debian before. Certainly not within the last 5 years.
But my point still stands. In just about all the major desktop distros it’s trivial. In fact, many of the popular distros will install the Nvidia drivers during the OS installation itself. You don’t even need to do anything post-install. And other distros, like Ubuntu, it’s a single click in a settings window.
Yeah, you’re right. Might as well go with AMD. NVidia works but isn’t needed. I think NVidia generally has low power draw though, so just check to make sure.
