Silent of Fanless PCI-E Video Card

  • Thread starter Thread starter Haggar
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Haggar

Can I get a reccomendation for a manufacturer of these cards and appropriate
model numbers, needs not to be for gaming.
 
"Haggar" said:
Can I get a reccomendation for a manufacturer of these cards and appropriate
model numbers, needs not to be for gaming.
Click to expand...

Start here, set Interface = PCI Express x16:
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=48

If you list the cards from lowest price to highest price, the
fanless cards tend to be the lower priced cards. That is because,
to be fanless, the cards cannot be real gamer cards, they have
to be de-clocked, or the memory interface dropped from 256 bits wide
to 128 bits or 64 bits wide. None of that affects the ability of
the card to be used for Photoshop, email, web surfing, and so on.

These two cards, are examples of convection cooled video cards.
They are the fastest cards I could find that are still cooled
without a fan. Cards like these will still get pretty warm,
at least compared to a $50 card.

VisionTek VTK X1600XT512PCIe Radeon X1600XT 512MB $265 (heatpipes)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814129056

eVGA 256-P2-N549 Geforce 7600GS 256MB $115
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130004

To be properly cooled, there still has to be some air movement
inside the computer case. Removing all the fans in the computer
case, and relying on the PSU fan, is not enough. The part that
is most sensitive to temperature, is the disk drive, and allowing
room air to hit the disk drive first, will reduce the risk to
the part least able to take the heat. With the other components,
a few crashes will tell you that something is running too hot.
(In other words, if using just the PSU fan, remove the faceplate
in the drive tray holding your boot drive, and then any cool air
being pulled into the computer case, flows over the hard drive
first. But I really wouldn't recommend running with just the PSU
fan, unless silence is more important than reducing the life of
the computer components.)

HTH,
Paul
 
Paul said:
Start here, set Interface = PCI Express x16:
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/SubCategory.asp?SubCategory=48

If you list the cards from lowest price to highest price, the
fanless cards tend to be the lower priced cards. That is because,
to be fanless, the cards cannot be real gamer cards, they have
to be de-clocked, or the memory interface dropped from 256 bits wide
to 128 bits or 64 bits wide. None of that affects the ability of
the card to be used for Photoshop, email, web surfing, and so on.

These two cards, are examples of convection cooled video cards.
They are the fastest cards I could find that are still cooled
without a fan. Cards like these will still get pretty warm,
at least compared to a $50 card.

VisionTek VTK X1600XT512PCIe Radeon X1600XT 512MB $265 (heatpipes)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814129056

eVGA 256-P2-N549 Geforce 7600GS 256MB $115
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130004

To be properly cooled, there still has to be some air movement
inside the computer case. Removing all the fans in the computer
case, and relying on the PSU fan, is not enough. The part that
is most sensitive to temperature, is the disk drive, and allowing
room air to hit the disk drive first, will reduce the risk to
the part least able to take the heat. With the other components,
a few crashes will tell you that something is running too hot.
(In other words, if using just the PSU fan, remove the faceplate
in the drive tray holding your boot drive, and then any cool air
being pulled into the computer case, flows over the hard drive
first. But I really wouldn't recommend running with just the PSU
fan, unless silence is more important than reducing the life of
the computer components.)

HTH,
Paul
Click to expand...

There are those slot fans that can go next to a video card. THey are
squirrel-cage jobs, and VERY silent.

But if all you need to do is make a picture on the screen (no games, no
photoshop) you can still find plain vanilla PCI (not PCIe) cards. They
rarely require fans.

A good 8Mb card will play full-screen DVD. But I've seen poor ones with
more memory fail.

I can say that some manufactures are better than others.

S3, and SiS, are very poor, is trident (are they still around?).

Matrox makes reliable cards, but not top performing ones. THey are
popular with business for this reason. ATI is a decent manufacturor.

Nvidia's cards are often rebranded by names like Diamond, Gigabyte,
Asus, and so on If you don't recognise the name on a video card,
chances are good that it's a rebranded Nvidia. They are high
performance, but not particularly long lasting. Maybe because they're a
little to easy to overclock, and run hot to begin with)

Intel's chips work. But they're low performance. They are usually
integrated into motherboards. Good enough for most business
applications.
 
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