blackbonner posted at 6:07 AM Sat, 30 November 2024 - #4491756

So, my CPU is an Intel Core i7x980 3.33GHz from 2010.
The mainboard is an ASUSTec P6x58D Premium from 2010
The original build had an ATI GPU Radeon HD 5970 Card installed, which was replaced by an Nvidia Gforce GTX 1650 3 years ago. 
I guess the necessary connectors are already in place to run an AMD card again.
The OS is Windows 10 pro and my Poser is version 13 latest edition.
Currendly 16GB of DDR3 RAM is installed and the power supply has 750Watts.
The machine is old, but it works for 14 years absolutly stable and reliable.

I find the way Nvidia distributes graphics cards a bit confusing. On Amazone you get as search results for Nvidia RTX 3060 several different brands and models like Asus or Gigabyte or Zotac and every card has editions.
Thats not really helpful, isn't it?

Your NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1650 used a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. And it was two slots wide, so it also occupied the adjacent slot. It required up to 75W.

Your ASUSTec P6x58D Premium has 6 PCI-Express slots, but only three of them (the long ones) are PCI-Express 2.0 x16. (The short ones are too short, one is x1 and the others maybe x8? Too short anyway. But that's ok, you only need one x16 and there are three.) My guess is most of those slots are not in use so you might even be able to fit a triple wide card if you wanted.

Note that your slot is PCI-Express version 2.0, but the card was designed for 3.0. And in fact the RTX 3060 is designed for 4.0. That's ok, PCI-Express is backwards compatible, but it means you are not going to get the full speed from whatever card you install. The PCI-Express 2.0 slot transfers data at half the speed of 3.0, and a quarter the speed of 4.0. How much difference does that actually make? I found a benchmark that suggests using 3.0 instead of 4.0 only slows things down by maybe 3%, 2.0 will be worse but maybe it won't be terrible. Just note that upgrading the motherboard would also improve the speed to some degree.

NVIDIA designs GPUs but then licenses them to many manufacturers. So when you search and find the NVIDIA RTX 3060 from Asus, Gigabyte, Zotac, etc, they really are basically all the same thing. Each manufacturer will set them up a little bit differently, mostly in terms of cooling fans, but the difference is usually trivial. Unless one has particularly bad reviews, it shouldn't matter.

NVIDIA's RTX 3000 series cards (3060, 3070, 3080, 3090) are the previous generation. The 4000 series cards are the current generation. Within each generation, lower numbers are less powerful, so the 3090 is more powerful than the 3080, which is more powerful than the 3070, which is more powerful than the 3060. Looking across generations, the 4060 will be more powerful than the 3060 (by approximately 20%), but it's less obvious whether (for example) a 3070 is more or less powerful than 4060. Also, if it has a Ti or Super after the number, that's another step up. So it's hard to compare them directly without looking at benchmarks. This one is pretty easy to read: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Regarding AMD vs NVIDIA, you will get more of a speed boost from NVIDIA because Poser uses Optix which is an NVIDIA feature. Even if otherwise AMD looks comparable.