More memory and/or external video; is it worth the money?

General Discussion
1

I’ve bought SharpenAI and DenoiseAI and I am very happy with both of them.
Even my old Olympus E20-p pictures can be razor sharp! :slight_smile:

I use a NUC (NUC10i7FNHN) for several reasons and I don’t want a huge powerful machine, as I don’t have use for it for about 80% of my work. Besides that, I can’t take such a device with me when I am on the road. A laptop would have been possible too, but with the same specs the NUC is cheaper and every hotel has a big screen.

The NUC has an i7 and 16GB memory and I was curious if the performance of SharpenAI and DenoiseAI will be significantly affected if I added more memory (max 64 GB). Would that be noticeable?
At the moment both programs are not using all 16GB when running, so I have doubts there.

And if I added an external videocard like a Sapphire Pulse GearBox 500 Thunderbolt 3 PULSE RX 6600 XT eGFX? Would that save a lot of time? These things are pretty expensive (and this is even a cheap one), but if it saves me a lot of time, that thing pays for itself.

I know there are a lot of variables to take in account and that there is no easy answer, but the overall question is; is it worth to spend money on?

2

The RAM above 16GB I would say no. I only use 8GB and my performance is good/great.

However, I added an internal video/GPU card with 4GB video ram. That is what provided a dramatic speedup for me.

So, I would think, in general, the GPU would help performance the most, though I have no experience with external Thunderbolt devices.

There is a straight-forward benchmark that you could run to do a before/after assuming you could return the GPU if it didn’t produce a good cost/benefit ratio (I have no idea of the price point)…

3

Thanks for your reply.

I’ll then dive into the external graphics card options. I can look for a shop with a good return policy, as it is different over here if you buy stuff as a business or private.

4

Here is the benchmark:

https://www.neatvideo.com/download/neatbench