Interesting fanless budget GPU for GW2

I'm throwing together a HTPC that I'd like to use for occasional gaming. It's got an integrated Radeon 4275 but that's not game-worthy.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814161343

Before you balk at this being just a budget 5550, HIS made this variant with GDDR5 memory instead of the standard DDR2. And it's fanless. My case has good air flow for a HTPC case:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...D=3332167&SID=

Motherboard is a teeny mini-ITX with a full PCI-E x16 link:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131659

Athlon II X3 @ 3.0 ghz, 4 GB of Hyper-X DDR800 ram with good timings.

That's actually a good idea, but here's what I put together to get ready for GW2. And it only cost me $400 I got the processor, mobo, HDD, DVD from Newegg.

Asus M4A78T-E AM3 MoBo with integrated ATI HD3300 and desktop clocking options. (Let's you overclock on desktop without worrying about frying proc thru a desktop prog.)

AMD Phenom II x4 Black Edition 965 Processor running at 3.41Ghz.

Dynex 400w PSU

Corsair 2Gb ddr3 Ram x2 4Gb total

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit

All inside a Thermaltake Black Widow SopranorS 101 tower.

The integrated video would have been fine but I had an nVidia GeForce 9400 GT card that I thru in there.

I already had the GC and the PSU but those would've cost around $300 for both of those.

But the MoBo and the rest cost $400-500 so it's a pretty good deal.

Well, the video card can handle some light gaming esp. at lower resolutions, but the fanless ones have been tested to run at ~ 100c while running Furmark...... I would not want to game with one, not even with GW2.

A GeForce 9400 with only 16 stream processors will struggle with any 3D graphics, no? The 5500 has 320 stream processors.

Why, what will happen? It dies on me in 18 months? They're cheap.

Furmark/benchmark whatever push a GPU harder than a game anyway. I'm not worried.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814500138

IMO, you'd be better off with a GT240. It's more expensive, but worth it.

http://www.pureoverclock.com/article972.html

GT240 is much faster than the Radeon 5550 as far as gaming is concerned. Even though the card you picked has GDDR5 instead of GDDR3, it's just another one of those gimmicky things that manufacturers do to make their cards look better on paper. A 5550 is still a 5550.

I'd take a look at this too:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...ater_vengeance

I'm curious as to why you want a fanless video card in particular. Is it because you want the HTPC to be totally silent?
If so, don't forget that, unless you arrange for some sort of passive cooling for the whole system, there will be a certain amount of fan noise from the cpu fan, power supply fan, and any case fans. These days, those fans can be very quiet though.
I only mention this because, you should be able to get a better video card with a fan, that would be relatively silent when just playing youtube videos, DVDs, etc., but would have the grunt to play games (with a bit more fan noise).
My HTPC has an HD4850 in it which is very quiet normally, even when playing GW at 1920x1080, but then again, my HTPC was never intended to be particularly quiet, so there is some fan noise from the CPU fan (which is currently a Q6600 with the stock cooler).

Very interesting case and mobo though.

Reviews I read say it tops out at 75 degrees under load.

Of course it won't be totally silent. I've built about 20 computers btw...

Yeah I want it to be as quiet as possible. 95% of the use this rig gets will be watching movies and playing music. At the moment I haven't even ordered a GPU for it since the integrated 4250 will be fine for these things.

But I figure I might give Civ 5 a shot on it on the plasma TV. Maybe GW1/2.

That card will not fit in a Mini-ITX system.


Actually that's not true at all.

"When compared to the 5550 cards that have GDDR3 memory, this GDDR5 version kicks ass, providing about 25% better performance. No doubt the higher core and memory clocks also make a big difference."

Not to mention that a lot of 5550s have DDR2.

http://www.pureoverclock.com/review.php?id=1018&page=12

That review shows that a 5550 is essentially equal to a 5570 in performance.

I'm curious about what they mean by "the 5550 is limited to 1280 resolution and low quality settings overall".

Edit - it appears that they mean 1280x1024. I would think that 1280x1024 would look pretty crappy on a 40-50" HDTV, so maybe you should be looking for something a bit heftier like a 5770.

Edit #2 - Btw, according to the specs on that mini-ITX case, it can accept a standard ATX power supply and full height cards. That means there's very few limits on video cards for it.

If you are not too botherd about gaming on it right now stick with the onboard gpu it will run games like gw and wow fine. Wait till Anet release the running specs for gw2 before picking out a new card.

Full height maybe. But does that include double-slot cards as well?

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1058-page1.html

If you don't put it under much load it looks great...... due to that high temperature I still wouldn't buy one if I planned to game on it myself though.

Looks like the temperature is mid-70s. That's not nearly high enough to damage the card...

A fanless 5670 is coming out soon...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Sapph...t-145373.shtml

Looks substantially more spendy though.

Hey, here it is:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102902

$115

And it's not underclocked like some fanless cards. It soundly beats a Nvidia GTS 240, coming in slightly behind the GTS 250.

http://www.kitguru.net/components/gr...dition-review/

The motherboard has the PCIe slot at the very edge of the board, so there is nothing blocking a dual-slot card, mobo-wise. It would only depend upon whether the case has room.....

Looking at pictures of the case, it does have two expansion slot covers, so it can probably handle a double slot card width-wise. However, length-wise it looks like it could be a problem for any card that extends much beyond the front of the motherboard. It's hard to tell though - the hard drive cage that is there may be removable.

Looking at the picture of that first video card, btw, that card's heatsink is almost the thickness of two slots anyway, but it looks like it would fit length-wise.

Looking at the pictures of that 5670, and the pictures of the case, you may have a problem physically fitting that card into the case. It looks like the cooling apparatus on the top of the card might have a conflict with the position of the power supply.

I just got everything in the mail today, except not the 5670 fanless GPU... Not sure what's up with Newegg but this order has taken forever... I'll update later.

By the way, it turns out that this tiny M-ITX motherboard supports ATI's Hybrid-Crossfire graphics, with its 4350 integrated GPU. Is that worth setting up? Anyone know if it makes much of a difference?

It can make quite a difference if you have a low power discrete card of the proper type/series combined with the on-board. Once the discrete card gets beyond a certain performance level, the Hybrid config doesn't add much.

In this case though, I don't know what the proper series of cards would be that work with your particular on-board chipset, nor do I know at what point (discrete card-wise), it ceases to be useful. You'll have to look it up.

(Tom's Hardware may be a good place to start.)

Yeah, this is what happened. The cooler makes this card super wide. Length-wise there's plenty of space though.

Gotta RMA