cheap passive card that won't bottleneck non gaming system

[lorkp]

Hi, I'm building a Conroe system based on a Gigabyte DS3 board. I'll be using the system for ripping and encoding CDs and DVDs, and general office stuff. I wanted to get an inexpensive passive video card, that wouldn't necessarily bottleneck my system for the tasks I outlined that's under $30 (if possible). The motherboard has PCI Express 16x, PCI Express and regular PCI slots. I don't necessarily want the latest technology (16x), but want to just spend enough to not cripple my system.

[Beyonder]

There are plenty of Geforce 6200 LE and Radeon X300SE cards around that $30 price point that are passive and have a 16x PCI-e interface. Both of those should be fine for what you're doing. Heck, my girlfriend even plays WoW on a Radeon X300SE, and it works surprisingly well.

It seems odd to me to put a card like this in a Conroe system, but I guess if you're sure you know what you'll be doing with it, go for it. Personally, I'd opt for either a radeon x1300 (~$70) or a Geforce 7600GS (~$115) for the best price/performance/silence, but that's just my two cents on the subject.

[darthan]

Buy any video card you want. Those are all 2D tasks and won't require any special work from the video card. Heck, an S3 Virge would do it (as long as you made sure to get it upgraded with 4 whole megabytes of RAM so it could handle 1024x768 resolution). I'd recommend getting a card with a ATI, Nvidia or Matrox GPU, other options are more likely to have questionable driver support. Or, of course, a motherboard with integrated graphics would be fine too, just set it to use only 32MB of system RAM (because you won't need any more, so why waste it on video).

[QuietOC]

I think you would be best served with the cheapest PCIe video card you can find on sale (something like a 6200TC or X300). But here is the cheapest thing I found at Newegg: Radeon 7000 PCI.

[smilingcrow]

Any discrete GPU is fine for most people providing they aren’t playing games. Get a PCIe card as it will leave your PCI bandwidth untouched, which can be relevant in certain situations.
I’ve been using an NVidia 6200TC which has 128MB of onboard RAM and found it to be absolutely fine. It’s fairly low power although it does run surprisingly hot. I think the 7300LE is another good choice from nVidia; I’m not up on ATI products.
Make sure that you get a card with a decent amount of onboard RAM as many of the cheaper cards mix between using onboard RAM and system memory. I think 128MB is a safe number although 64MB may be fine also. You don’t actually need much RAM for 2D work but I’ve noticed that for playing certain video files it can help.

My 6200TC cost me £20 and supports DVI, dual monitors, HD TV output and has decent support for SD & HD video formats, although the feature set is not as full as higher end cards. Bloody good value though.

[Bories36]

Ya, i gota x300, and i play source, not on highest settings but i get 50fps and i play battefield 2, this is also with a 3.2p4

[Fat_bloater_dave]

well everyone elce has said it and i agree i brought an old AGP card off ebay for £2.50 for my server comptuer that i sometimes get to do ripping or encodeing and it doesnt seem to affect anything.

[lorkp]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I think I'm going to get this card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130006. I may do some editing with photoshop. Would this card make the video quality worse or just slower than a faster card?

[QuietOC]

may do some editing with photoshop. Would this card make the video quality worse or just slower than a faster card?

There is also this open box 64MB 6300TC for $32.12 shipped.

If by "video quality" you mean 2D desktop quality. I believe the 6200TC, like every other current GPU/IGP, has on die RAMDACs, so it should have very good 2D quality.

Speed differences between video cards is mainly limited to 3D rendering performance. There are also minor video decoding performance differences. If you are interested in video decoding acceleration you will want to consider something like a 7300GT or X1300.

Really there is no real draw back in 2D performance from using onboard integrated video. Most systems have more memory bandwidth then their CPU can ever use. The 6200TC basically operate somewhat like integrated video--though it can fit its display buffer in its local memory.

[lorkp]

may do some editing with photoshop. Would this card make the video quality worse or just slower than a faster card?

There is also this open box 64MB 6300TC for $32.12 shipped.

If by "video quality" you mean 2D desktop quality. I believe the 6200TC, like every other current GPU/IGP, has on die RAMDACs, so it should have very good 2D quality.

Speed differences between video cards is mainly limited to 3D rendering performance. There are also minor video decoding performance differences. If you are interested in video decoding acceleration you will want to consider something like a 7300GT or X1300.

Really there is no real draw back in 2D performance from using onboard integrated video. Most systems have more memory bandwidth then their CPU can ever use. The 6200TC basically operate somewhat like integrated video--though it can fit its display buffer in its local memory.

Are you saying that a video card could effect the speed of video encoding with programs like cce and dvd-rebuilder?

[Fat_bloater_dave]

No he is saying Video Decodeing so the quality of waching videos.

[QuietOC]

No he is saying Video Decodeing so the quality of waching videos.

This is nVidia's page describing which of their cards support which video decoding features. Enjoy.