CPU/GPU To CUDA or not to CUDA, that is the question!

[Injera]

I purchased a Dell Optiplex 755 back in May of this year. As I usually do I went hunting those my new used pc & found a lot of software that the gentleman I purchased it from didn't list in his ad, mainly & happly one of them was DVDfab.

While watching Netflix one night it hit me that I could rip my blu-ray disc to the hard drive w/DVDfab. I just had to purchase a blu-ray drive & larger hard drive, which I did.

My original setup was

*2.16 Ghz cpu
*2 Gb ddr2-800 ram
*160 Gb HDD
*built in video
*no blu-ray drive

I've upgrade to

*Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3 GHz 6M 1333 SLB9J
*4x1GB 2Rx8 PC2-5300U-555-12 DIMM
*1 TB HDD
*2 TB HDD
*the 160 Gb is now in an external enclosure I use for backup
*for the video card I used an old ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series that I had *laying around
*Pioneer Electronics USA Blu Ray Combo Drive, BDC-207DBK
1st question - when I was having problems compressing my BD 50 to BD 25 iso I read a lot about CUDA. 1st how I should have a card that supports CUDA but I read a lot that people need to "turn the CUDA crap off!!!". So should I invest in card that supports CUDA or not?

I know my pc is not the lastest nor greatest & I've pushed it to it's limits but I didn't buy it with the idea of backing up my blu-ray collection & also I'm disabled & $$$ is a huge factor so when recommending a card please remember a $300+ card is not possible or just save my $$$ and buy/build a new one, which I'm looking into now.

Thank you in advance.

Tom

[signals]

The ATI card does not support CUDA, you need an nvidia-based card for that. DVDFab does support GPU acceleration with some ATI cards, you will need to check in DVDFab settings under A/V Codec to see if it shows that option as available with your card. Your CPU is not really cut out for compressing Blu-rays without GPU support of some kind, which means it will be slow if you disable all GPU support, but it will work.

You may have trouble updating DVDFab. If the original owner is still using it the key will probably be blacklisted.