FINAL DECISION: Was able to find a new EVGA Geforce GT 710 2GB for $42 (tax included) shipped. More than I wanted to spend? Yes, but new is better than used for the same price. Found it on TopHatter. Should be here by the 22nd. Fingers crossed.
UPDATE:
First, a big thank you to all who responded. So after taking some early advice, here are more that are closer to what I’m willing to spend on starting with the craziest option mainly because the lastest drivers are from 2019.
1)
ETA: Telsa is ded!
!Why? GTX 480 cheapest is ~$55 used for 1.5GB, Tesla is ~$30 used. But would the Tesla be a strain on the mobo since it has no display ports???
2)
This one may be the winner and tbh, I owe this to ETA Prime. He’s actually using a 1GB card with 3.0ghz Core 2 duo in the attached video. This one is ~$40 used, but a new 1GB unit is about $1 cheaper.
H/T to ETA Prime
3)
Why? A GeForce GTX 750Ti 2GB is PCIe 3.0 and starts ~$60. This is ~$45 with 2020 drivers available, but they are professional grade.
I had some others with 2GB under the same price range, but it seems pointless to post more. The GT 710 makes the most sense, but I’m still intrigued by the Quadros. Or would the Tesla work just fine.
Any other suggestions are welcome, especially if you can make more good points for avoiding a Quadro.
Original:
I’ve slowly started building an Emulation PC with my old ass PC parts purchased mainly back in 2007! Along with the Gigabyte motherboard in the first photo, it has an AMD Athlon 64 x2 6400+ Black Edition cpu, 12GB of DDR2 800 mhz PCs-6400 ram (should be 16GB, but I can’t find one 4GB stick), and is running Win10 Pro 1909. Added is a MSI R5450 512mb gpu that I can’t remember when I purchased it (2012???). Together it was able to run Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube using the Dolphin emulator at its standard 30fps, but it felt like it was struggling. So for the most part, I seem to be on the right track for emulating almost anything from the 6th generation of consoles (GC, Xbox, PS2) and older.
I want to get a more capable GPU but it needs to be cheap. I guess the hard part is that since I have old shit, what would actually still work with it? I have 3 in mind, 2 Nvidia and 1 AMD:
AMD RADEON R5 340X 2GB DDR3
ASUS ENGTS450 DC OC/DI/1GD5
Nvidia Quadro 2000 1GB GDDR5 (this is actually a professional graphics solution workstation card for CAD & DDS, but it’s cheap and seems to be a GPU option with DirectX 12 support)
I have some more that I’m looking at, all with 1 GB ram and using either DDR3 or GDDR5. The best part, I can find them used/refurbed $35 USD or less.
So what would be best?