We recently replaced out aging overhead projector with two 75" 4k TVs. EW6 worked fine with the projector which was running 1280 x 1024 resolution on an Intel i5 2500, 8 gigs of ram, 500 gb Samsung 850 EVO ssd, and a 1 gig ATI HD 6870 running 64bit Windows 7 Pro and Office 2010 Pro with the latest updates and drivers. The TVs are running at 1080p due to the video card and were mounted and wired up with higher end splitter, signal amps, and Cat 6 cable by a church member that does that sort of thing for a living. I noticed a slight lag at times with the TVs that wasn't there with the projector. The lag seems to be more pronounced when displaying a PPTX thru EW6 (latest version). We have enough left in the budget for a couple of computer updates (something I told them would be needed when they specced out the TVs). I'm looking at either a GTX1050 or a 1050 Ti.



My first question is would the normal 2 gig card be sufficient or would a 4 gig card be better suited for this? Not sure if we'll ever actually display at 4k, but it would be a possibility if the hardware supports it adequately. And would it be worthwhile spending the extra money for a 1050 Ti or will the regular 1050 provide acceptable performance? We don't do a lot of Videos, but since out old Worship Leader left a couple of weeks ago and a new one hasn't been hired or appointed yet who knows what they might want to do. We have our Foldback running on a Projector at it's maximum 900p 16 x 9 resolution.



The other thing is the i5 2500 is a 4 core cpu. Would it be worthwhile replacing that with an i7 2600 4 core 8 thread processor? I'm finding them for about $60 or so.



Any other advice concerning this would be greatly appreciated. I have been working with the children's church that still used EW2009 due to the old Core 2 Duo laptop with Intel graphics we have down there and I don't have a lot of experience with EW6 yet. I just don't want to make another mistake getting the wrong graphics card again like I did with the HD 6870. AMD/ATI graphics were recommended when I built that computer for the church while EW6 was still in development. It was a year or so later that EW switched to recommending NVidia graphics.

Hi,



If I were to upgrade anything, it would be the video card. The CPU is probably not being taxed that much, but there is a simple way to see how it's holding up. Just go live with a video and watch the cpu usage in the task manager. If it's going well over 50% usage, you need to look at the I7. I don't think you'll see that personally.



The AMD Radeon 6870 was no slouch of a video card in its day, but you'll see a performance boost with the newer NVIDIA card. I would personally go with the 1050 TI, but the 1050 still should be adequate. Also, we do most of our testing and development on NVIDIA cards, so we'll catch issues with them faster than AMD.

I don't think I've seen EasyWorship has surpassed 1GB of video memory usage yet, but that's really determined by the resolution you are rendering.



I hope this helps.

Sorry for the delay in response.

Thanks. For the most part I haven't noticed the CPU using more than about 20 to 25% overall. It might spike up to 60/70% (possibly higher for a few seconds) occasionally when launching (loading) a larger PPTX file. But it will always drop back down to the normal level right away.



Too bad about the NVidia focus in the development dept. I've always found ATI/AMD cards to have superior display quality than NVidia overall. They might not be as fast, but the displays tend to look better.

Our developers prefer NVDIA's drivers and technology over AMD as they have had less trouble with them. AMD seems to include surprises with their drivers sometimes. We had a problem in recent years with one of their included apps (playstv) crashing EasyWorship.