Which NVIDIA graphics card for CS4 & CS5.5 Premiere?

Question

I just upgraded to CS5.5 Production Premium but I'm still using XP 32bit. That means I had to load the CS4 version of Premiere and After Effects. Sooner or later I'll upgrade to 64bit Win but in the mean time which graphics card will give me the best bang for the buck and still be useful for CS5.5 later? Money isn't an issue, I just don't want to pay for something and not benefit from it. What's worse is Adobe doesn't even list cards newer than the 8800 and Quadro FX for CS4! Weren't GTX cards available before CS5 came out? Do I need to update a file in CS4 apps to make them accept cards for GPU processing?
Adobe and NVIDIA keep pushing the Quadro cards but when you look at the benchmarks it looks like the GTX cards do just as well. I will use the system for gaming sometimes so DX11 is a must. I have a watercooled i7 920 OC @ 4.0GHz and very stable, temps never go above 60C under full load. I have 6GB RAM and use a memory handler to access the RAM over what XP can use, and use it for virtual mem and caches etc. But my current graphics card is a slightly OC'd 9800GT w/512MB. My system doesn't like to scrub video that isn't rendered unless it's at lower resolutions and obviously I'd like rendering to be as fast as possible.
Looking around I see:
GTX560-TI @ $240
GTX570 @ $300
GTX480 @ $300
GTX570 @ $300
GTX580 @ $460
Quadro 4000 @ $550
Quadro 5000 @ $1200
So what's the secret? Where's the sweet spot?
TIA

Answer 1

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JEShort01 wrote:
The "secret" to MPE bliss is to get the video card AND Win7 64bit AND load your CS5.5. I really don't think that the video card would help much running CS4 on 32bit. Regarding which card, I'd say the sweet spot since you want to game and use CS5.5 would be to go with a GTX 480 with two or three fans (single fan reference design is too LOUD). Also, if you are not going to Win7 right away, delay your purchase and the next GEN of NVidia will be closer or out and you may either want one of the new smaller die-size cards or you could benefit form lower prices on what's available today.
Jim
So you're saying on Win32 and CS4 Pr, Ae, AME, the graphics card doesn't matter at all? That I won't see any improvement over my 512MB 9800GT?
If I was to narrow it down even farther, the most important aspect would be in the "preview" performance. I can always render when I'm not using the system but sometimes the preview windows hang while working on a project. The problem worsens as the resolution increases or as the project gets more complicated. I had the same problem with PP1.5 which is why I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to see if a newer version would help.
Cooling isn't an issue as long as a water block is available for my next card. I've read the 570 & 580 may be the same reference layout and use the same coolers, I'm still looking into that. I know I can liquid cool the 480, 560TI, 580. I have no idea about the Quadro's, I've never seen a block for those.
I'd like to go to Win64 but other software etc is keeping me from getting there soon. I'm looking into dual booting but have read about lots of problems with folder/file sharing issues when going from XP to Win7. I keep all files/projects on a seperate drive and some are shared over a network. If MS hasn't solved the sharing issues I'm forced to stick with XP. I have too many files that need read/write access and Win7 is stated to set all shares to read only. I'm still researching if it's been resolved.
So it's important to know if anything will help CS4 because as stated above, it'll make more sence to wait for the next gen cards for use in CS5.5.
The bottom line is, I built this system from the ground up just a few years ago before Win64 was so popular. I used the very best components (the 9800GT is actually the lowest componet I bought because gaming wasn't that important at the time). I'm running steady overclocked @ 4.0 and boot from an SSD drive. The data drives are 7200RPM and I bought the fastest RAM I could at the time. Obviously people were editing happily a few years ago on equipment inferior to mine. What's the catch? What am I missing to run smoothly on Win32? I'm assuming it's the graphics card because it's the only place I skimped. Maybe I have a software conflict keeping any version of Pr from working smoothly.
Being 3 gens behind, and mediocre at that, I thought the card might be a good place to start.