passive cooled video card for HTPC

[b0bby]

hope this is the right subforum

so i have a 2yr old custom built HTPC with an ATI 2600XT passive cooled video card. its been working well for bluray/hddvd playback on one of those first gen LG drives but its been two years and i'm looking for an upgrade to do some casual gaming. can anyone suggest some good (better than mine) passive cooled video card available right now. thanks

[onyxbfly]

Originally Posted by b0bby

hope this is the right subforum

so i have a 2yr old custom built HTPC with an ATI 2600XT passive cooled video card. its been working well for bluray/hddvd playback on one of those first gen LG drives but its been two years and i'm looking for an upgrade to do some casual gaming. can anyone suggest some good (better than mine) passive cooled video card available right now. thanks

Are you looking for a full size card or a half size card?

[b0bby]

Originally Posted by onyxbfly

Are you looking for a full size card or a half size card?

i believe my current card is full size. im using a silverstone cw01 if that helps as far as case size. its not one of those super low profile cases, its about 6 inches tall. as long as its not big like those dual slot cards with a big fan i think im good.

[Blu-Dog]

Originally Posted by b0bby

i believe my current card is full size. im using a silverstone cw01 if that helps as far as case size. its not one of those super low profile cases, its about 6 inches tall. as long as its not big like those dual slot cards with a big fan i think im good.

Check out the ATI Radeon HD 5450. Around $50 various places, passive cooling, and 7.1 audio - not a gaming card, but good for multimedia stuff.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...-overview.aspx

[tootall82103]

Well, ATI is the way to go right now for HTPC cards. The 5xxx series is the only one to support HD Audio. Not sure if that is important to you or not though. Just curious as to why you want a passive card? My first guess is because of sound.

I'd go for this card for some light gaming and multimedia stuff if tou will accept a fan.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102871
It is a very quiet fan. I have the exact one on my Nvidia GT240. Also, you can adjust fan speed in the ATI control center, if you want it to always stay at 25%, you can. About the only time you 'might' hear the fan is if you're pushing it with a game. Multimedia use won't stress it at all.

If a fan is a no go then I'd get what was mentioned above.
The ATI 5450
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150469
It will be pretty crappy for games but multimedia will be just fine.

The one is fanless and is the next step up from my first link. Dual slot design though.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131300

[DrasticPlastic]

I recently got the Gigabyte Radeon HD5450 with 512 mb. DDR3 ram and it works great. It bitstreams HD audio to my yamaha RX-V1800 just fine, and sounds amazing.

[hoju3508]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3734&p=4

Some issues with deinterlacing...

As for the 5450, the results aren’t quite what we were hoping for. AMD believes that the 5450 is powerful enough that they allow it to use all of the AVIVO processing features at once, which means the drivers allow us to turn on things like Vector Adaptive Deinterlacing and denoising even when Smooth Video Playback is enabled. However in our tests with Smooth Video Playback enabled, Vector Adaptive Deinterlacing isn’t used even when we force it through the drivers. Everything else works with Smooth Video Playback enabled, just not Vector Adaptive Deinterlacing. If we disable Smooth Video Playback, then Vector Adaptive Deinterlacing will kick in.

We’ve informed AMD of our findings, and they’re still looking in to the issue. However we believe that the problem is ultimately a lack of resources on the 5450 to handle all of this, so we’ll see what they come up with.

It also wouldn’t be fair on our part to harp on this too much, as by no means is the 5450 a bad HTPC card. Everything else works correctly and AMD’s Motion Adaptive mode is quite good. In fact the only practical reason that Vector Adaptive mode matters is that it handles one thing better than Motion Adaptive: angled lines. The lines on sports fields suffer badly from interlacing artifacts, and Motion Adaptive mode can’t completely reconstruct them correctly; you need Vector Adaptive to accomplish this. So the only issue with the 5450 as an HTPC card is that it’s not a great choice for watching sports on a large TV where Motion Adaptive Deinterlacing would result in jagged lines on the field.

[DrasticPlastic]

Originally Posted by hoju3508

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3734&p=4

Some issues with deinterlacing...

That can be fixed easily, at least until new drivers create a permanent solution.

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showpost...9&postcount=13

[hoju3508]

Originally Posted by DrasticPlastic

That can be fixed easily, at least until new drivers create a permanent solution.

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showpost...9&postcount=13

Thanks for the info.

[b0bby]

Originally Posted by tootall82103

Well, ATI is the way to go right now for HTPC cards. The 5xxx series is the only one to support HD Audio. Not sure if that is important to you or not though. Just curious as to why you want a passive card? My first guess is because of sound.

I'd go for this card for some light gaming and multimedia stuff if tou will accept a fan.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102871
It is a very quiet fan. I have the exact one on my Nvidia GT240. Also, you can adjust fan speed in the ATI control center, if you want it to always stay at 25%, you can. About the only time you 'might' hear the fan is if you're pushing it with a game. Multimedia use won't stress it at all.

If a fan is a no go then I'd get what was mentioned above.
The ATI 5450
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150469
It will be pretty crappy for games but multimedia will be just fine.

The one is fanless and is the next step up from my first link. Dual slot design though.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131300

thanks for the suggestions! my main reason for going fanless was because of noise and my current ati 2600xt is fanless so i thought why not go this route again. my htpc is almost completely silent minus the "activity" noise of the hard drives.

i wanted some gaming power just to play world of warcraft. its not a very intensive game but with max settings you still need a beastly card to get good frame rates. the dual slot card you suggested should do the trick. im going to give it a try and hope it fits.

[ryoohki]

they do a fanless 5750 now also witch is also good for moderate gaming..