Looking for a quiet, preferably fanless 3/4 screen card

[nilson]

Hi there,

This summer my father has asked me to build a quiet rig for him that packs quite a punch for his audio encoding needs in his little amateur music studio. While cpu, motherboard, case etc. I am quite confident that my 6 silent systems I have build have given me enough experience to choose components without help, but the graphics card is where I get stuck.

The reason is that I have never build a pc needing more than 2 monitors. His setup involves two 19 inch lcds and a 32inch tv that he uses as a third monitor for entertainment purposes. Currently everytime we want to use the tv we have to switch around screens in the control panel courtesy of his old Geforce 5300 (or 5200 im not quite sure).

So the main question is as follows:

What cards are there on the market that can support 3 screens at the same time and are silent/can be silenced with the use of 3rd party heatsinks and can support a hdtv as the third screen at all times?

Also the tv is currently fed via a s-video cable, which only allows 1024*786 resolution if i recall correctly, leading to a lot of fumbling with aspect ratio settings which results in a phone call to me every damn time he wants to use it because everything on screen is stretched.
Since he uses an external usb soundcard for his mic's, guitars etc hdmi probably isnt a worthwhile solution since it forces the use of the graphics cards audio chips.

[joelmusicman]

If you're looking AMD, then get the 740/780G motherboard. The graphics on the motherboard can drive 1 or 2 monitors (depending on the board), and you can add an ATI graphics card to drive 2 more. The dedicated card you get wouldn't need a whole lot of horsepower, so you could get a passive card as well.

I belive there are similar solutions with NVidia/nForce motherboards as well. The important thing is just to match the chipset and video card brand.

[nilson]

Thx dude, i will keep that in mind ^^