Coolest and cheapest fanless card at the moment?

Terje · Post by **Terje** » Sat Oct 02, 2010 5:49 am

Anyone got any idea what this would be?

With cool, I mean temperature wise of course...

Performance is more or less a non-issue (although it is great if it is linux compatible).

Tested a 5450 passive, but it is definitely a hot card...

Modo · Post by **Modo** » Sat Oct 02, 2010 6:19 am

To get less heat with reasonable performance, you'd probably have to use some of the modern integrated solutions. The 5450 is a very efficient design, and should not be overheating in normal scenarios. Either the case used has extremely bad airflow, or you are expecting unrealistic (much too low) temperatures for a GPU.

Luke M · Post by **Luke M** » Sat Oct 02, 2010 8:49 am

If performance is truly a non-issue, use an ancient PCI (not PCIe) card. If the graphics chip doesn't have a heat sink on it, you know it's low power by today's standards.

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Sat Oct 02, 2010 9:40 am

No graphics card at all is sometimes an option. Sometimes we forget that servers can be headless.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Sat Oct 02, 2010 11:01 am

5450 is the lowest power card on the market

IDLE TDP of 6W and max TDP of 19W

Close to it are (repeating the 5450 for comparison)

Code: Select all

Card Idle TDP Max TDP
5450   6        19
4350            20
3430            20
2400 Pro        20
2350            20

Keep in mind actual power use is lower than TDP in most cases.

http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.ph ... c=264&st=0 shows the 5450 only using 15W at most.

The last Nvidia card that performed under those sorts of power limits was the GeForce 7300 GS from 5 years ago (and there was the 7300 LE which used even less). Oh the 8500 GT was in that range but I don't consider it because of the problems the 8xxx cards had with failures due to bad solder.

As to cost you might find one of the older cards in the table above cheaper than a 5450 but I wouldn't guarantee it. On top of that you'd have a older card that may not play nice with newer OSes.

Terje · Post by **Terje** » Sun Oct 03, 2010 6:20 am

Thanks!

Guess I will stay with the 5450 then.

I do not have a problem with it overheating, but want to keep the cabinet fan to an absolute minimum and the 5450 definitely produces heat!

Yes, I have been considering headless as well (tested too), but it is a bit awkward at times when for instance fsck wants you to press "yes" under boot or some other odd event occur.

This is an Asus mainboard, wish they could have done something to develop a ethernet management port with remote console cheap enough to include on every motherboard rather than the reasonably useless express gate thingy they have added.

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Mon Oct 04, 2010 5:08 am

Terje wrote:Yes, I have been considering headless as well (tested too), but it is a bit awkward at times when for instance fsck wants you to press "yes" under boot or some other odd event occur.

Usually a server flavor of the OS will work ok. So vanilla Ubuntu might not work great headless but Ubuntu Server will.

Coolest and cheapest fanless card at the moment?

Coolest and cheapest fanless card at the moment?

Re: Coolest and cheapest fanless card at the moment?