Low end video reccomendations

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zaniix

Gawd
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Nov 4, 2011
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So long story short I am going to re-purpose my I7-920 as a storage/media streaming box and the current video card is a 560TI 448 which as you can imagine generates more heat and draws more power than I want for something that will almost never have a monitor attached.

Any suggestions for a reliable low end PCIe video card with low power draw? I just need it for the setup and occasional troubleshooting and so my system boots, I think it requires a vid card to boot.

My main issue is how do I know a card is going to be low power and heat. I am usually buying something for gaming without caring about heat or power consumption so this is a new area for me.
So PCIe of any version, and atleast 1 DVI, low power, low heat
Considering something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130605&ignorebbr=1
thanks
 
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That's fine. Any card with a passive heat sink that tiny is using less than 10w load.
 
defaultluser said:
That's fine. Any card with a passive heat sink that tiny is using less than 10w load.
Click to expand...

Thats what I was thinking, MC locally here has an Asus model with a really large heatsink that will do nicely.

My current card pulls 150w at idle according to some reviews so it really isn't what I want in there. It looks like the Geforce 210s pull under 30 watts
 
zaniix said:
Thats what I was thinking, MC locally here has an Asus model with a really large heatsink that will do nicely.

My current card pulls 150w at idle according to some reviews so it really isn't what I want in there. It looks like the Geforce 210s pull under 30 watts
Click to expand...

Your 560 448 doesn't use 150w at idle. The card itself only pulls 22w at idle:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_560_Ti_448_Cores_DirectCU_II/25.html

But that's put to shame by the 6w consumed by the GT 210 at idle:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_550_Ti_Direct_Cu/21.html

So your call which one you want to go with. One will cost you 30 bucks today, but may save you money in the long run. But it's easy to cool that extra 14w idle power even in a tiny system.

Techpowerup measures the card power consumption independently of the rest of the system. Most other review sites just report the power consumed by the entire system, so it's impossible to compare idle power form different reviews with different test setups.

This is nice because with the video card power isolated, you don't have to worry about the rest of the test setup. The results will always be directly comparable :D
 
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