Do you’ve enough free disk space?
I had a slow working pc a few weeks ago. Not specific PL. The 250GB C drive was full which I couldn’t believe. I ran CHKDSK /f and then the C drive was ok again and the performance of the pc too. It happened twice to me and I still don’t know what caused that.
George
Normally, things don’t “just change” on a computer. Please try to remember if the change occurred after an application or OS update, a malware infection, some Windows or hardware maintenance operation or whatever could have changed between “the past” and “now”.
Greg:
Good to know that CPU temperatures aren’t indicating a problem.
George:
No problems with disk space. There’s over a TB free and it’s less than a year old.
Mark:
I get that my graphics card is completely insufficient for the task. Based on your and other comments it’s clear that upgrading to an adequate card would be the best thing to do. However the tradeoff re processing power and power consumption is tricky. My PC is an HP tower and so the PSU is non-standard and the only ones that fit are either HP or no-name brands. I recently replaced it with an HP unit when I saw other problems that could have been power related so it’s at least new and maybe more modern, but there’s no remaining wiggle room with the PSU. I’ve looked at the various cards you and others have mentioned but what I’ve seen so far makes me concerned about degrading reliability even for a very modest card because of additional power use.
As a former developer I appreciate that it’s extremely difficult to figure out what’s going on when you’re not supplied with adequate information. I’d love to give that to you but it’s just not available. I haven’t had any hardware of software problems. It’s been months since I used DeepPRIME XD and so I can’t relate any event to this problem. Sorry but that’s all I’ve got.
I’ll try to find a display card that will give me adequate performance without threatening reliability. If I can’t make that work I guess it’s time to go shopping. My machine is 5 yrs. old so that wouldn’t be an unreasonable thing to do anyway.
Thanks again to everyone for taking the time to help me with this.
Mike
It MAY be possible to mount your mobo inside another case depending how much of the PC HP has made non standard. If they have used standard ATX layout and holes, it would be no problem. Even if not, you could drill holes in a cheap PC case and use stand offs to hold the mobo. Won’t be very pretty, but will allow you to put in a decent PS and use your drives without re-installing windows.
Cheap cases can be had from many computers places. In the UK £20 will buy a sturdy if bland case for example. Ditto, a decent power supply.
Alternatively, if the mobo lead end on the power supply are standard, you could drill the case of your curent PC and make a power supply fit
As many others have explained, to get short export times for DeepPRIME and DeepPRIME XD you need a decent graphics card. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need a mid-range or greater card to see a worthwhile improvement in export times.
My system is an old Dell with a lowly 250W (or maybe only 240W) PSU but it handles a Nvidia GTX 1050ti without any problem and even that old card can export DeepPRIME in about 30 secs. Without that card the export time is about 5 mins. I don’t know how long it would take to do DeepPRIME XD as I’m still on PL5, not PL6. As far as I’m concerned a reduction in export times from 5 mins to 30 secs is definitely worthwhile.
For the simplicity (it took me longer to download the many many GB driver than it did to fit the card to the machine) and low cost (I got it for not many GBP on eBay) of adding a 1050ti card without the hassle of having to upgrade the PSU I feel I got a very, very, worthwhile improvement.
In summary, my experience is similar to that of @mwsilvers.
I’m using a NVidia GTX 1060 6GB, which also doesn’t need a lot of power (while the machine has a with 500W power supply). → see here … for more
My Dell is circa 7 years old with a Nvidia GTX 750 Ti graphics card. With Nikon D7200 .NEF RAW files, I get DeepPRIME exports taking around 30s each like Stuck.
The GTX 1050 Ti looks like a great idea and definitely worth the ~$200 to get greatly improved export performance, so I want to install one. I looked carefully inside my case, took pictures, and measured as best I could to see if I had fit problems, and unfortunately I think I might.
The problem is that the fan case may hit the 2 ~1" high plugs for the front panel USB 3.1 ports. In the photo the card socket and the plugs are circled in red. It’s hard to measure the exact space that’s available and also hard to find the width of a lot of the cards. However it seems the cards are around 1.5" wide and that’s about the space I think I have available so I can’t tell for sure if a card will hit or not.
Can I assume that the cards and motherboards are built to ensure that they won’t interfere? Any other thoughts on how to deal with this?
This comes in a number of shapes and siezes depending on which licenced card maker produces it (ggogle a photo and you will see). The largest card seems to be a double width, taking into account the dual fans. There are shorter versions with a single fan that are avilable, so it isn’t quite cut and dried over the size issue.
If you are careful you shouldn’t have to pay that much. Back in March of this year I only paid ~70GBP, i.e. ~ 90USD from my 1050ti card on eBay. NB care is required on eBay as some cards have been hammered by people using them for crypto mining.
As noted by @tilltheendofeternity the ‘same’ Nvidia graphics card is available in a wide range of brands (ASUS, MSI, Zotac, etc), mine is a Palit. Some have one fan, some have two, some are ‘low profile’, etc. I’m not sure but I think all are ‘double width’, meaning it fits into one slot but the thickness means it overhangs / blocks the neighbouring slot.
Even if you don’t buy from eBay it’s worth searching eBay and browsing the listings, the images will give you some idea of the size of the card and its many variations. Here’s search on the US version of eBay to get you started:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2553941.m570.l1313&_nkw=gtx+1050ti&_sacat=0
I also have that card, but I want to mention a possible caveat to buying one at this point… The GTX 1050 Ti is on the very low end of supported cards. There is the possibility that processing a significant future update to DeepPRIME or DeepPRIME XD, or the addition of some new AI functionality, might require a more powerful card than the 1050 Ti. In other words there is always the potential that purchasing this old card at this time may provide relatively short-term value. I purchased my card new just before the pandemic and all the supply chain issues. It cost me around $150 USD or so new, and I have so far gotten more than 3 years of use out of it. If I was going to make a similar purchase again today, I would get a new power supply and a higher-end card.
Mark
About NVidia cards :
nvidia graphic cards have NOW 3 kind of cores : cuda cores, raytracing cores (vector computation) and tensor cores (AI computation).
10xx series (Pascal architecture) only have cuda core. Very powerfull for lot of parallel computations, but not specialised for AI.
20xx serie : (Turing architecture) are the first to get RT (raytracing cores) and tensor (AI) cores.
30xx serie and 40xx serie : more powerfull cuda, RT and tensor cores.
Using softwares that use extensively simultaneously all those 3 kinds of cores I can say that 10xx serie is the first one (and the only one for now) which can not work with the latest versions of those softwares (since several years now).
This is not a complete problem for photolab wich emulate (or something like that) AI computation with cpu, but I would recommand to get chances to keep intact the AI calculation capacities of the graphic card in the medium term to take at least a series 20xx.
For now dxo still continu to make cpu (and cuda cores) able to compute AI, but I think this is a waste of time, and then will be a time when they decide to only develop for optimized circuits.
Thanks for the information.
I tried before to replace the 250 W PSU but there’s no space for a larger one in the HP box and only HP PSUs will fit. So I need a card that will work reliably with 250 W.
I appreciate the risk with the GTX 1050 Ti but it looks like my only option short of a new PC. That will certainly be a custom tower so I don’t have to mess with HP-specific replacement parts. For now I’ll get a inexpensive GTX 1050 Ti and plan to get a new desktop sometime next year.
Finding a new GTX 1050 Ti is weird. I need the MSI 1-fan card to try to try to avoid hitting the USB plugs. There are 2-fan models available new for a little under $200. But the 1-fan option is very hard to find: I only see it new on Amazon for $500. Used or refurbished are available on NewEgg but they’re all used from China. NewEgg used to be good but now they get such poor reviews that I’d never use them. Finally I found a used one on eBay for $90 which I bought. For that amount I can accept the risk that it won’t fit and that DxO will withdraw support.
HP are very good products but not easy to customize …
Formfactor, special drivers, etc …
I’ve heard of external graphic cards (my girlfriend works in theatres and uses them sometime for some creations), but I don’t know how efficient and practicle they are for what we do.
Anyway, for $200 I don’t think you take a lot of risks, because photography software can’t abandon the cpu calculation so soon because their users do not necessarily have ultra specialized workstations.
Nvidea generally cycles capability down each generation. I.e. a GTX 960 becomes a GTX 1050. I haven’t followed recent generations but it may be that something like a GTX 3030 would provide the same level of performance as the GTX 1050, with some AI cores, and even lower power usage. Someone else will have to do the legwork though, as Nvidia cards have been dead on Mac for about ten years now so I have little reason to follow them. The last OS on which relatively recent Nvidia cards worked was High Sierra, 10.13.
MSI isn’t the only brand that does a 1-fan card, Palit also do one, that’s the version I have.
And Inno3D too.
FWIW
I have this Zotac one in my old build and it has served me well @75W not a big hit for ‘normal’ builds but the likes of @MikeA01730 brand build with its damned underpowered PSU, care required.
ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti Mini | ZOTAC
Hi everyone,
I’m happy to report that the MSI GTX 1050 Ti fit my HP box and I installed it without incident.
I tested and found that DP XD exports that took 5 min. before take about 14 sec. with the new display card! That’s around 20x faster! That’s really fast and I couldn’t he happier.
Thanks again to everyone for their help.
Mike
