Nvidia GTX 1030 card recommendation for HTPC?

trumee

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Hello,

I am looking for a Nvidia GTX 1030 card for my HTPC. The primary concern is temperature, I am looking for a card which would run the coolest. Sound/Noise is not much of a concern. There are a few cards available without fans, not sure if they provide enough cooling.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
 
The active coolers on these 25w cards are rarely beefy, and they are usually fixed-speed. So the core temperatures tend to shoot up quickly, until there's enough temperature differential to cool he card.

The passive card have a lot more heat capacity (card's temperature rises slower), so the the card spends a whole lot more of it's life at lower temperatures. And when they DO hit peak, they're not any worse than the active coolers.

Toms did a comparison of active and passive. The temperatures of the passive are no worse than the active, and will be lower than active if you tend to play games for fifteen minutes or less.

And passive is always better than active in terms of fan longevity. Cheap screamer fans tend to die quickly.

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Go passive and improve case airflow instead, shitty tiny fans suck in the noise vs cooling contest.

You just missed the $59 evga b-stock sale though! I'm hoping one of the cards with hdmi+DP instead of hdmi+DVI goes on sale, have a server that would make a nice storage + 4k video player combo for someone.
 
Depends on what you are doing too. If you are just playing movies or streaming them, the gpu isn't going to get as hot as if you are playing games. I have a coworker who has one as basically a emulation station and it doesn't even press it that hard. Try and pull up some PUBG or something and you will be in trouble, but for real HTPC stuff it should be fine. The graph above is playing Witcher 3 so yeah.. it gets hot doing that.
 
Depends on what you are doing too. If you are just playing movies or streaming them, the gpu isn't going to get as hot as if you are playing games. I have a coworker who has one as basically a emulation station and it doesn't even press it that hard. Try and pull up some PUBG or something and you will be in trouble, but for real HTPC stuff it should be fine. The graph above is playing Witcher 3 so yeah.. it gets hot doing that.

But the active-cooled model gets hotter faster when gaming. It's almost instantaneous.

The red line is passive. The blue line is active.
 
Be aware that Nvidia has recently decided to downgrade the 1030 to a lesser capable model with no warning or label saying so.
 
Be aware that Nvidia has recently decided to downgrade the 1030 to a lesser capable model with no warning or label saying so.


That's only a cut model for 13" ultra-portable laptops. It's a fullly-enabled model, but has a lower TDP for the smaller size.

If you want to concentrate on parts that will actually hurt desktop users, stick with the cut RX 560 cards.
 
I'm always the type of person to replace the TIM on the stock coolers with something a bit better, like AS5 or Arctic MX-4. Should be good for a few degrees C.
 
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