welcome to the forum.
i hope you're not kidding. you have an old desktop.

your i7-950 cpu speed score from https://www.cpubenchmark.net is 5533.
your video card speed score from https://www.videocardbenchmark.net is 1087. by the way it's same cpubenchmark.net site.

my 9 years old dell XPS has a tad faster cpu than yours(see signature block). originally had i7-2720qm. upgraded to i7-2860QM.
my FX-8370E desktop is slightly faster. cpu speed score is 7871 and gpu(GTX 960 2G) speed score is 5839.
my newer desktop ryzen 7 2700X is a lot faster. cpu speed score is 16928 and gpu(GTX 1060 6G) speed score is 9098.

a rough AVC H.264 video rendering speed difference between dell xps and fx is about 10 minutes and ryzen 7 to fx is about half. if fx takes an hour to do then ryzen 7 does it in half an hour!

if you haven't looked at GTX960 Performance Comparisons then read for your reference and don't forget to Click here to access the data sheet. only advantage i have on ryzen 7 cpu is rendering HEVC H.265. all will come to a crawl speed whereas ryzen 7 is like move out the way please...

going back to your original ?
i'd recommend minimum GTX 1060 6G or GTX 1050Ti 4G or GTX 1660 6G(this is the better choice).
it's not the gpu but faster cpu will lessen the pain using the PD.

an old soldier never dies but it'll have to fade away...

happy happy joy joy

PepsiMan
'garbage in garbage out' 'no bridge too far'

Yashica Electro 8 LD-6 Super 8mm
Asrock TaiChi X470, AMD R7 2700X, W7P 64, MSI GTX1060 6GB, Corsair 16GB/RAM
Dell XPS L702X i7-2860QM, W7P / W10P 64, Intel HD3000/nVidia GT 550M 1GB, Micron 16GB/RAM
Samsung Galaxy Note3/NX1

Thanks for your answers and advice. Yes off course my desktop is becoming a bit of an old beast.. But since the CPU is barely used while trimming and cutting some clips I didn't see that as the major problem. It will probably become a problem when starting to render my videos but in that case I could leave the desktop working (at night perhaps) and start doing something else. But generally yes, upgrading the whole desktop would always be the best solution. But that's not what I intended to do right now.

Quote ... But that's not what I intended to do right now.

okay. i've done that. press produce and go to sleep. wake up in the morning, cut grass and little bit later in the aftenoon the video is finished! meanwhile i prayed no power outtages during that time...
since i am the bottleneck, i still use dell xps to edit then use the ryzen 7 for final rendering.

Quote ...
going back to your original ?
i'd recommend minimum GTX 1060 6G or GTX 1050Ti 4G or GTX 1660 6G(this is the better choice). ...

GTX 1660 6G ^^

happy happy joy joy

PepsiMan
'garbage in garbage out' 'no bridge too far'

Yashica Electro 8 LD-6 Super 8mm
Asrock TaiChi X470, AMD R7 2700X, W7P 64, MSI GTX1060 6GB, Corsair 16GB/RAM
Dell XPS L702X i7-2860QM, W7P / W10P 64, Intel HD3000/nVidia GT 550M 1GB, Micron 16GB/RAM
Samsung Galaxy Note3/NX1

Or the GTX-1650 Super. It performs almost as fast the 1660 (if you were going to buy a 1660, then spend $10 more to buy the 1660 Super), has the same hardware encoder as the 1660, and only needs a 6 pin external PCI power plug (100W) vs an 8 pin.

It "only" has 4 GB of Memory. But it shares it with your on board RAM. And unless you're doing something huge in Blender, I don't imagine that that memory will be a bottleneck with PD.

Hello again,

I choose to buy the MSI Geforce 1660 GTX Ventus super with 6GB DDR6. After that I changed my SSD's to AHCI and changed the Windows 10 register to accept the AHCI modus instead of IDE. Writing speed is about 300-350 MB/s now. At first, I still had problems with PD 18. It still took minutes for opening the media (DV-AVI) in the project library. So I was a bit dissapointed about the results of my efforts.

Other software that I am working with like Autodesk Revit and Phase One Capture 1 had visible profits from my investments.

Later on I discovered that some of my captured files in the PD 18 project library were somehow damaged. The index file was missing according to VLC mediaplayer. After skipping these captured media files PD 18 was really quick. Opening and saving the project files goes instantly right now. So good news after all.

^^

happy happy joy joy

PepsiMan
'garbage in garbage out' 'no bridge too far'

Yashica Electro 8 LD-6 Super 8mm
Asrock TaiChi X470, AMD R7 2700X, W7P 64, MSI GTX1060 6GB, Corsair 16GB/RAM
Dell XPS L702X i7-2860QM, W7P / W10P 64, Intel HD3000/nVidia GT 550M 1GB, Micron 16GB/RAM
Samsung Galaxy Note3/NX1