Well to chime in- I have an onboard cpu / gpu as well as a literal physical EXTERNAL graphics card and I have also never seen this extra horse power that is advertised. (See my sig for my specs.)

Gary- I would hold onto that HD7870 if I were you. It offers much more hardware rendering options in terms of faster video hardware encoding- See this thread here for a break down: http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/29236.page

As for your Intel chip- you have the current latest "K" series 4770 which is unlocked. Which means it can be tweaked and over clocked. With some mild overclocking it can get even faster and still be stable with not much extra heat generation.

I started another thread here to discuss CPU cores so as not to pull this one off topic: http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/0/32454.page#176212

Rob
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be

When it comes to rendering video for my purposes, the HD4600 is actually faster than the ATI HD7870. I don't use fancy FX or transitions. 99% if I use a transition at all , it's a crossfade.

I actually bought PD12 for WTV file support. Cut commercials and render to MP4 to stream to my LG TV.

I bought the ATI card with thinking that I was going with AMD CPU and motherboard, but ended up with Intel. Not for the CPU but rather motherboard features.

Will eventually get to overclocking, but need a stable system at stock first. Intel still needs to fix USB3 drivers. Intel i7 4770k, 16GB, GTX1060 3GB, Two 240GB SSD, 4TB HD, Sony HDR-TD20V 3D camcorder, Sony SLT-A65VK for still images, Windows 10 Pro, 64bit
Gary Russell -- TN USA