I would strongly recommend against buying PD15 because its nVidia hardware compatibility stopped with driver version 411.70 in Sept 2018. That means that PD15 won't be able to work with any GPU cards released after that date, and you will also likely be fighting Windows when it continually wants to update your video driver.

The integrated GPU in Intel CPUs is unaffected by this issue, but they are generally quite a bit less capable than dedicated nVidia cards; AMD cards are also unaffected, although I have no experience with them and there have been some ongoing issues here on the forum.

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Quote I would strongly recommend against buying PD15 because its nVidia hardware compatibility stopped with driver version 411.70 in Sept 2018. That means that PD15 won't be able to work with any GPU cards released after that date, and you will also likely be fighting Windows when it continually wants to update your video driver.

The integrated GPU in Intel CPUs is unaffected by this issue, but they are generally quite a bit less capable than dedicated nVidia cards; AMD cards are also unaffected, although I have no experience with them and there have been some ongoing issues here on the forum.

Thanks optodata for your reply and the info, and PD16 is also low cost option I'd consider if best.
I was first going to move my then hot - now a chilled Radeon HD6800 over to the new system and go from there depending. So sounds like PD15 may be fine with my 2012 Radeon, and many still hot pre-2018 used cards are available for the taking.
So I changed the topic to include specs for both PD15 and 16 (I still have the specs from Cyberlink for PD12).

Quote I was first going to move my then hot - now a chilled Radeon HD6800 over to the new system and go from there depending. So sounds like PD15 may be fine with my 2012 Radeon, and many still hot pre-2018 used cards are available for the taking.
So I changed the topic to include specs for both PD15 and 16 (I still have the specs from Cyberlink for PD12).

The use of the UVD in the Radeon HD 6800 Series has been deprecated 5 years ago. If this is the GPU used in your i7-2600 system then you would know that hardware encoding quit working for this card back in 2015 when AMD introduced the 15.xx series of drivers which only supported their newer gpu cards with vcn encoders. See this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder .

You definitely need to buy a newer AMD card if you want to use Windows 10 and AMD hardware encoding at the same time.

The older AMD 14.xx drivers to enable hardware h.264 encoding in that Radeon HD 6800 series may not stay installed in a Windows 10 system.

Quote The use of the UVD in the Radeon HD 6800 Series has been deprecated 5 years ago. If this is the GPU used in your i7-2600 system then you would know that hardware encoding quit working for this card back in 2015 when AMD introduced the 15.xx series of drivers which only supported their newer gpu cards with vcn encoders. See this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder

It might be that the OP is not clear. In the OP not once is anything stated about encoding, just "hardware accel, and openCL", I'm not even sure exactly what that means. If it refers to the pref > Hardware Acceleration and the OpenCL option, that will be available with virtually any card. The value of such option alone may be near zero for one's timeline, but it will be selectable.

But all correct, some old hardware and drivers required to get the very outdated PD15 to use "Hardware video encoder" box on the "Produce" page. But as OP requested, here is a page CL listed for GPU's for PD15, https://www.cyberlink.com/support/faq-content.do?id=19353

What real features, capability, will be functional with the hardware has never been stated by CL that I've seen for any release.

Jeff

Quote

It might be that the OP is not clear. In the OP not once is anything stated about encoding, just "hardware accel, and openCL", I'm not even sure exactly what that means. If it refers to the pref > Hardware Acceleration and the OpenCL option, that will be available with virtually any card. The value of such option alone may be near zero for one's timeline, but it will be selectable.

But all correct, some old hardware and drivers required to get the very outdated PD15 to use "Hardware video encoder" box on the "Produce" page. But as OP requested, here is a page CL listed for GPU's for PD15, https://www.cyberlink.com/support/faq-content.do?id=19353

What real features, capability, will be functional with the hardware has never been stated by CL that I've seen for any release.

Jeff

opdata, tomsac, JL_JL,
Thanks all for the replies. While the new faster system should improve my compiling times and all, does sound like I need to skip PD15 and move on to PD 16, 17, or 18 (same price). I looked at the supplied PD15 link, and then found the PD16 list as well. So I'm buying this system, and the video card options above the base Intel UHD that I could afford if really needbe, are GeForce GT1030 2GB at +$100, or a Radeon 5600 6GB +$150. Or I could supply my own choice if there's another option that will provide all the accel, encoding, etc with PD16-18. Can ya'll give me your suggestions for the best performance/compatibility for the money for this non-power/gamer user?