I’m thinking of buying a 660 ti, cuz it’s really cheap.
It meets the current system requirements.
But will these requirements also be the same for the upcoming Blender 4?
A 660 ti is an 11 year old gpu as of 2023.
Will it soon become unsupported?
Or will it last at least 5 more years or so?
Edit: I’m not buying the 660 ti for performance reasons.
Rather, just so I can open Blender 4 and newer versions and see if their new features are something I need (e.g. I heard rigify is updated in Blender 4)
A 660 ti is faaster than my current gpu (radeon hd 5770), which can’t even open the latest Blender 4 alphas.
@DNorman I should say I’m not expecting fast cycles renders.
Rather, I just want a cheap gpu that can run Blender 4 and its features, even if slowly.
Because a 660 ti is better than my current gpu (radeon hd 5770).
I currently can’t even open the latest Blender 4 alphas.
Would a 660 ti still work for this purpose?
Why would you buy a piece of hardware that’s 11 years old? It’s already past warranty, it’s almost certainly used, and you’ll be lucky if it works for a week. Computer parts have a ten year life span if you’re lucky- 11 is just asking for DOA
@thorn Only $50 CAD.
The current plan is: spend as little money as possible, if at all. That way, I can save money for if/when I do need to build a brand new pc.
Because it turns out that I might not need a new pc right now.
Are you willing to spend 50 dollars for something that almost certainly won’t work, and if it does, will only work for a couple weeks at best? If so, get it. If not, save your money
I don’t consider 50 bucks to be that much money in the grand scheme of computer components, but it’s also a card that is worth basically nothing at this point in time.
So, I’ll just put it this way - you’ve asked people for their advice. I suggest you take it.
There’s an asus gtx 970 (blower style) for $36 CAD + $28 shipping
(so $64 CAD total, $47 USD).
The seller has all positive reviews in the last 12 months,
Been on ebay since 2002.
But do the pics look ok?
The back looks like it’s got dust, maybe white specs.
I can blow it with air.
Is the price too good to be true?
Edit: is there a way to tell if this was used for mining or not?
2nd edit: They said it was in an office pc they upgraded. And the reason it is so cheap is because they flip products quickly due to limited storage space.
I think it would be worth it to wait and try to find someone who is selling a second hand early RTX model, a lot of gamers and 3d nerds ( ) update graphics cards every 4 years.
Maybe someone here has a 3-4 year old card to sell, or you could check in other 3d/gaming forums.
Also watch out for this:
Last year I finally updated my card but I am afraid the old one was even worse than the 660ti.
It is now worthless, my wife has an integrated card that performs better
It technically already is, as of September 2021, which was the last real Nvidia driver update for it.
Since then, there has only been ‘security’ driver updates for the 600 series of cards. In other words, they don’t care if it works or doesn’t work with any latest software release, they are just patching any security bugs in the driver from 2021.
There is pretty much only one reason to get such a card, it’s basically free and you have some old PC/server where you need some video output in order to fix why it doesn’t boot up and the CPU doesn’t have a working iGPU.
It’s for that reason I still have my old 750Ti card, it works at a base level and for an old system with either a very old iGPU (where the card would still be faster) or a CPU that just doesn’t have one, then I can get to a desktop and do basic stuff. I wouldn’t dream of trying to use Blender with it.
) update graphics cards every 4 years.