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Passive/Silent card for Vista Media Centre?

GSXRMovistar

GSXRMovistar

GSXRMovistar

Soldato
Joined
6 Nov 2002
Posts
9,963
Location
London UK
Okay I recently purchased a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO SILENT 256MB DDR2 HDTV/DVI (PCI-E)Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO SILENT 256MB DDR2 HDTV/DVI (PCI-E) card which on arrival I disappointingly found it was neither passive or silent as advertised.

I now need to return this and replace it with something more suitable. So instead of getting it wrong again can anyone recommend a card which will be:-

Passive/Silent
Work with Vista Media Centre
Output via DVI (Main TV)
Output via s-video/composite (to feed second screen in adjoining room)
Capable of HD 1080p processing

Thanks for any suggestions. :)
 
Hi
What sort of budget are we talking about.
They have this but it's £82.99 in vat
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Ultimate Silent 256MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (11110-08-50R)
 
I would be careful with passive 2600XT you need very good airflow in the case, I was going to buy the Sapphire one however it was out of stock so I got a Gigabyte 2600XT passive one.

Its like having a raditor in the HTPC case the card itself sits around 90c when in use which isn't too bad considering it has no fan however heats up the rest of the case significantly. I have a 120mm fan free standing in the case to provide better airflow with all the slot backplates removed but the top of the case is still hot to the touch with the CPU sitting at 52/53c idle and the card at 85-90c.

I'm not sure if the Sapphire one is any better however that puts the heatsink for the GPU rather close to the CPU heatsink (gigabyte one is on the other side) so I suspect that will be a nightmare to keep both cool aswell.

However at the moment I have the case very quiet to the point where the samsung spin point is the only part I can hear even with AMM set to quiet, tried 3 of these drives and they are all the same so going to have to think how to sort this.,
 
Lian Li S80B with a Thermalright HR-01 Passive CPU cooler. I've replaced the 3 stock fans with Yate Loons. The whole rig runs at the warm end of comfortable, but the cores don't go over 70C (3.4GHz passive!) and the graphics card is almost untouchable if I've been watching video.
 
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