Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

They make noise, too.

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tim851
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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by tim851 » Thu Jul 31, 2014 5:56 am

desktop.ready wrote:I mean, there's no hot-swap graphics cards, right? As far as I know it's a pretty integrated part of the system. Impossible to just shut down, leaving the rest of the system running along without it, and then let it come back again, without some serious work.
It's possible. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Optimus
I haven't seen this in the wild though, or tried it out myself.
It would make a buttload of sense, seeing as every single consumer CPU comes with integrated graphics these days.

Also, Apple laptops have been able to seemlessly switch between onboard graphics and dedicated GPUs (AMD and nVidia) for years.

Abula
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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by Abula » Thu Jul 31, 2014 6:03 am

Nvidia optimus or their laptop setup for swaping gpus, it doesnt turn off the gpu, at least to what i have tested, it just remains in the lowest idle state, but still pretty cool, as you can use always the integrated until you game. Personally i was hopping to see this in desktops but seems its not something that nvidia is perusing. But would be very nice with cards like the STRIX where i bet no load will make it remain fanless until an app requires it.
Last edited by Abula on Thu Jul 31, 2014 6:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

desktop.ready
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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by desktop.ready » Thu Jul 31, 2014 6:05 am

quest_for_silence wrote: Nowadays you can have either a quiet, powerful rig, or a quiet, small rig.
You can't have a system which is small, quiet and powerful at the same time (I will consider the presence of any discrete graphics with a TDP comparable to a CPU one as indicative of a "powerful" rig).
Well I managed to get this small/quiet/powerful with the KFA2 GTX 750 Ti. It's just that I have to physically pull out the graphic card when I don't use it. :wink:
Shame that I am not really good with my hands. Otherwise I would have try to build a ghetto-mod with a PCI-express riser and a switch. :)

Vicotnik
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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by Vicotnik » Thu Jul 31, 2014 6:32 am

tim851 wrote:It's possible. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Optimus
I haven't seen this in the wild though, or tried it out myself.
It would make a buttload of sense, seeing as every single consumer CPU comes with integrated graphics these days.
Thank you. Hopefully they implement some of that in upcoming cards.
tim851 wrote:Also, Apple laptops have been able to seemlessly switch between onboard graphics and dedicated GPUs (AMD and nVidia) for years.
How is Linux support? ;)

Apple can do this very well because of the controlled environment. Zerocore for example is much more prone to problems because of the open PC landscape.

Abula
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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by Abula » Thu Jul 31, 2014 7:17 am

Nvidia has had Optimus running stable laptops for maybe 3 years now, at first was messy, when optimus was in its infancy, manufactures were implementing switchable grafics with a push of button, slowly it was implemented on laptops, at first there were just some drivers that supported the optimus, there were no unified drivers, laptop drivers were released separate and a lot of times by 3rd party sites, lap2go comes to mind, there were some pretty good modders that keep the gaming community alive and running, but then nvidia unified and started supporting a lot of the custom gpus (before you will need drivers from let say ASUS modified by them that could be installed on their laptops gpus), but now all seem to have standardized, a new release from nvidia always comes with laptop version, and works fine 99% of the time, their implementation has come a long way, optimus now its very stable, i haven't had a blue screen in two years with it running.

That said, i don't think Nvidia sees it like a viable or needed implementation on on desktops, they would have already done it, but nvidia downclocking is pretty good, running at such low clocks that my gpu most of the time runs cooler than my cpus on idle. Personally i would love its implementation, as i could save some W and heat by not using my GTX780 on something like watching a video o even playing games that dont requiere a dedicated gpu, but i gave up on the idea ever coming, i think nvidia dont see it as important, nor the majority of the desktop market.

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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by xan_user » Thu Jul 31, 2014 7:37 am

side tangent/soap-box

this is one of the many reasons id love to see graphics cards morph into the roll of actual motherboards. at least for gaming rigs. pick your GPU(mobo) from you favorite oem in your choice of atx/mitx form-factors and then stick the CPU, RAM and storage into that. have optional sockets on high end GPU/mobo's for add-on GPU chips for multiple graphics cores. that way the GPU becomes the central command center of the computer, with the bios designed around it. hell, do we even need a CPU if the GPU becomes the controller?

desktop.ready
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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by desktop.ready » Fri Aug 01, 2014 12:28 am

quest_for_silence wrote:Nowadays you can have either a quiet, powerful rig, or a quiet, small rig.
You can't have a system which is small, quiet and powerful at the same time (I will consider the presence of any discrete graphics with a TDP comparable to a CPU one as indicative of a "powerful" rig).
By the way, how about the Zotac Zbox EN760 ?
It has a graphic card comparable to the GTX 750 and it is tiny.

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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by Vicotnik » Fri Aug 01, 2014 12:56 am

desktop.ready wrote:By the way, how about the Zotac Zbox EN760 ?
It has a graphic card comparable to the GTX 750 and it is tiny.
Seems exactly like what you are looking for. A gaming laptop in a small desktop case. Idle noise and power consumption shouldn't be too bad.

desktop.ready
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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by desktop.ready » Fri Aug 01, 2014 1:13 am

Vicotnik wrote:
desktop.ready wrote:By the way, how about the Zotac Zbox EN760 ?
It has a graphic card comparable to the GTX 750 and it is tiny.
Seems exactly like what you are looking for. A gaming laptop in a small desktop case. Idle noise and power consumption shouldn't be too bad.
It's even reported to be quiet during gaming. For that I will believe it when I hear it !

I was wondering if I could use this GTX 860M on a desktop motherboard.
There are some MXM to PCI-E converters on the market, so maybe that's possible (and fun to build !).

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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by quest_for_silence » Fri Aug 01, 2014 3:35 am

desktop.ready wrote:By the way, how about the Zotac Zbox EN760 ?
It has a graphic card comparable to the GTX 750 and it is tiny.

If we give a look to the only ZBOX already reviewed by SPCR (2010), it shouldn't be that quiet (being active cooled, and sporting a mechanical hard drive, I guess/hope it could idle nearby the 20dB mark).

By the way, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, isn't it? :wink:

tim851
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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by tim851 » Fri Aug 01, 2014 4:19 pm

Abula wrote:Nvidia optimus or their laptop setup for swaping gpus, it doesnt turn off the gpu, at least to what i have tested
That may very well be. Powering off the graphics card is likely 100% an Operating System issue, i.e. Windows doesn't take to kindly to PCIe devices just disappearing and reappearing. So enabling some kind of sleep state on the GPU would be the simplest workaround.

That's why Apple has been ahead of the curve in that regard. They spec'ed the behavior to nVidia and AMD and provided them an easy API to latch onto. Microsoft, not being in the laptop business (before Surface), has probably not seen the necessity.
Vicotnik wrote:How is Linux support? ;)
If you google "nvidia optimus linux" it does come up with lots of results. I have absolutely no experience with Linux, so that's as far as I go.
xan_user wrote:hell, do we even need a CPU if the GPU becomes the controller?
Technically, both are microprocessors. Both are Turing complete, so in theory interchangable.
It's just that GPUs have a very different architecture. A desktop CPU has between 2 and 8 cores, each capable of doing highly complex calculations. A GPU has up to 3000 "cores" (stream processors, Unified Shader Model), each dead simple and only good for simple calculations.
Thus, a GPU is only effective if the problem it's computing can be broken up into many many simple calculations. If it can't, it falls apart. And if the last 9 years of multi-core CPUs on the desktop have taught us anything, it's that a lot of software problems cannot be easily multi-threaded.

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Re: Gaming, Low profile and 0db at idle

Post by xan_user » Sat Aug 02, 2014 7:28 am

but i had such high hopes for this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnLJTmciJ7w

thread jack over. back to the quest for low profile GPU with a fan that shuts off at idle. :wink:

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