Yeah, but for the same price you can get a faster video card.
Not so sure of that.
The board I bought had pretty darned good specifications; and in fact
uses the same chip-set they sell as a super-duper video gaming card.
And the price-differential between the two is only about 10%.
That's one reason it's called an "All-In-Wonder", because it *does* have
a pretty decent graphic's processor, DVD decoder, TV-tuner, MPG decoder,
and more video-outputs than you can shake a stick at, while retaining
the latest chips, GPU, on-board-memory, and other stuff you often pay
big bucks for as the "latest" video gaming board.
It seems the price of the big memory, GPU, and associated stuff for
gaming (and handling big screens at high resolution) costs so much that
they can stuff a TV-tuner and extra video I/O onto the board for very
little more. I suppose that's why their TV-Tuner boards alone sell for
less than $50, packaging, software, I/O cables, instruction-manual,
marketing, and all the rest. Costs very little to include the same
thing ON the video board itself, if there's room for it ... and with
today's integration, it don't take much. I'd lay long odds that their
manufacturing-price to add the tuner, cables, and software *to* an
existing high-performance video-board is under $15. That means they can
sell the combo-board with higher specifications than having the items
separate (using the GPU for some functions) for probably under $20,
without sacrificing a thing in performance.
After all, the high-priced bucks you pay for a high-end video-card are
mainly for the GPU and memory. Once you have those in place, adding
features like DVD decoding, MPG decoding, and such-like are merely cheap
software hidden in producing thousands of units. Putting that stuff in
ROM on the board is peanuts. That leaves the TV-tuner ... Which they
already make as a stand-alone board, and *there* it doesn't affect
performance of the video-card; so why should it do so if included *on*
the same board?
Just depends on what you need.
As you say ....
All other things being equal, active cooling is better.
Ah, but all things are *not* equal.
If you buy a card with the same bells, whistles, and speed, but one has
an active fan that will cause the board to *fry* if it fails, while the
other one runs even cooler without any fan at all ....
Yeah, that board will probably run even cooler and safer if you direct
fan-output over the heatsink ... But why bother?
Just depends on what you need.
That's true, there is a risk. I think my fan-cooled video card has
automatic shutdown above a certain temperature. It's not difficult,
it probably cost them a few pennies which cuts into the CEO's
profits.
I wish mine had that kind of protection. ;-{
These days CPUs all do; as do most motherboards.
Why not the same protection on video cards?
Especially considering the super-duper processors some have.
Some come with extra fan-supply-jacks that you can hook to a
motherboard, for the mobo to test for fan-stoppage.
And some motherboards support this by having AGP fan supplies.
However, *none* of the various hot video-boards I've ever bought do so,
while only one motherboard supported the idea.
I guess, unless the two types of board-manufacturers can get together,
or the video-board makers can include monitoring software and hardware,
we just will continue to see video boards frying (and often taking both
power-supplies and motherboards with them when they do).
