Which GPU for GPU accelerated rendering?

[vid83]

I have Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12 and I want to take advantage of GPU rendering so I can shorten render time. Currently it takes 3-4 minutes to render 1 minute of video.

My current GPU doesn't support GPU rendering. It is Nvidia GeForce 9300 GE and uses a PCI express x16 slot.

I don't want to spend too much money on a GPU (under $50). Which GPU should I buy to take advantage of GPU rendering and won't overheat my PC?

The system requirement says NVIDIA requires a CUDA-enabled GPU and driver 270.xx or later. GeForce GPUs: GeForce GTX 4xx Series or higher (or GeForce GT 2xx Series or higher with driver 285.62 or later).

My PC is Windows 8, 32-bit, Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 2.5GHz, 3GB RAM.

[jagabo]

I'm not fully up to date on this but a year or so ago there wasn't much difference between low end Nvidia cards and high end nvidia cards.

http://www.behardware.com/articles/828-27/h-264-encoding-cpu-vs-gpu-nvidia-cuda-amd-st...-and-x264.html

The output quality of GPU encoders is pretty low too. The x264 encoder (an open source h.264 encoder), on a quad core CPU, with fast settings, is as fast as GPU encoding and still delivers better quality.

Basically what's happened is this: the GPU manufacturers developed minimal (low quality) example encoders to give an idea of what's possible. They expected software developers to make their own high quality encoders. But what's happened is all the software developers simply added the example encoders to their software. So what you get is poor quality encoding.