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Passive Graphics Card - Not for gaming

valve90210

valve90210

valve90210

Soldato
Joined
17 Jan 2006
Posts
4,302
I am currently rvamping an old computer I have (a Pentium 3 866mhz) which I use for music playback.

At present it is pretty noisy but it doesn't matter cos it only tend tyo be used when there is a fair amountof background noise anyway.

However, I am soon to be moving and will be wanting this computer in the bedroom to play music at night so I would like to make the computer as quiet as possible. I have already thought about the CPU cooler and am going to go for a Nexus AXP-3200m which I have read several reviews of which say it's very quiet.

Now my thoughts have turned to the graphics card.

It have a very old Aopen PA256 card, which is perfectly adequate for the job that I am asking the comp to do, however, it's tiny little fan is rather noisy. are there any alternative means of coolng a Geforce2 card available? I have looked about but not really found anything?

Alternatively are does anyone know of any passively cooled cards that I might be able to pick up for very little money, either new or second hand?

It really doesn't need to be anything more powerful than what I have and I really don't want to be spending anythign much.

Any thoughts much appreciated!!! :o)

Valve
 
You could try something like this

Vantec Iceberq4 CCB-A4C Copper VGA cooling kit with Blue LED for £8

or try get hold of a secondhand ati 7000 for a little extra

HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon 7000 32MB DDR TV-Out (AGP) for £18, but no stock

You could also try 'cable tying' a cpu heatsink onto the card.
 
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Just had a thought....

Would the ATI 7000's be much the same performance as the GeForce 2MX???

Also, as I will be pretty much solely using the TV Output, of the card, what are the drivers like for doing this, is it easy to get it working and is it reliable?

Valve
 
Not 2 sure, but the 7000 should be faster and probably easier to implement the tv-out than the geforce2. I may be wrong here, but can it do dual display. I remember it being an either on the pc or on the tv scenario.

Also check compatitiblity of the 7000 with the mobo. AGP 1.5v vs AGP 3.3v
 
Thanks for the info re the 7000. I'm not too sure about the TV out on the Geforce 2 card, it's been a while since I had a play with it, But I think I could do dual display with it. I seem to remember that it was a real chore to get it working when I first had it but later driver versions made it much easier.

I'm looking at the motherboard spec on the AOpen website but I can't see anything about the AGP voltage. ALl it says is AGP 4x, is that any use???

Valve
 
Should work then

* Product Description: Connect 3D RADEON 7000 - graphics adapter - RADEON 7000 - 32 MB
* Device Type: Graphics adapter
* Enclosure Type: Plug-in card
* Interface Type: AGP 4x
* Graphics Processor / Vendor: ATI RADEON 7000
* RAMDAC Clock Speed: 300 MHz
* API Supported: OpenGL, DirectX
* Video Memory Installed ( Max ): 32 MB / 32 MB (max) - DDR SDRAM
* Video Output: 2048 x 1536 32-bit colour
* Video Compression Standards: MPEG-2
* TV Interface: TV out
* Compliant Standards: ISO 9001, DDC-1, DDC-2B, DDC-2B+
* System Requirements: Microsoft Windows 98SE/2000/ME/XP
 
That's good to hear!!! I shall have to have a look and see if I can pick up a bargain somewhere...

That'll just leave the PSU fan...

Oh and the Hard disks....

Oh and the DVD drive....

Well I'm getting there!!!

Valve
 
radeon 7000 may be a shed load slower, i can;t remember but it may not have hardware TnL. don;t quote me on that since i think any ati card beginning with radeon has a hardware TnL support but i can;t remember at this moment.
 
Thanks for that.

Just had a bit of a look and found that you're right the 7000 doesn't have hardware T&L. But I have also found that some of the Geforce2 Cards were passively cooled, so am currently hunting down one of those.

Valve
 
valve90210 said:
That'll just leave the PSU fan...

Oh and the Hard disks....

Oh and the DVD drive....
Click to expand...

Hi Valve,

Don't know if you need a hdd but you mention it as a noise issue!

You could either buy a hard drive cooler of some sort - they tend to be damped (that'll stop vibration and consequently noise) and as they generally encase the drive should quieten it a little too!

Alternatively, i have just bought a couple of 160gb Samsung spinpoints and they are awesome. They produce hardly any vibrations when on and are a good deal quieter than my seagate barracuda's!

With regards to a dvd drive i've never met any that don't sound like a hairdryer when they're spinning up a disc! Just make sure all your music's on the hard drive and you'll be fine!

gt_junkie
 
Hi there

I shall be needing to sort out the hard drives as they do make a fair bit of noise. I was initially thinking about drive enclosures but I'm not sure, having read up on them a bit. Seems like they can make the drives get very hot.

I've not really looked into the coolers, I'm not really sure if they are a good idea or not, one the one hand they might dampen the drive so it doesn't transmit so much noise to the case, but on the other, a lot of them have fans, which seems to defeat the point a little.

I'll have to do some reading up. I might start by putting some soft rubber between the drives and the case where the mounting screws go to see if that makes any difference....I doubt it will tho.

All my music will be on the hard disk, when playing dvd's the drive I've got, a nice old one which is actually quite quiet so that's not too much of an issue at the moment.
 
Using strips of rubber between the HD and cage does help, but because there isn't any metal-metal contact anymore the HD will get hotter, as the cage radiates heat from the HD. But if there's direct airflow over the HD from a large and slow rotating case fan it'll be ok. I can hardly hear the HD in my htpc (2x WD 7200rpm) only on defrag and the occasional blip-blip access isn't annoying since the nosie floor on the sound setup during quiet scenes will still drown the noise out. Just need to use a controller for the case fans as those are the loudest things in my htpc rig.
 
Thta's good to hear. what sort of rubber have you used? I've got some thin, rubber sheet stuff that you can get in craft shops, it's about 1mm thick or so, do you think this would be ok?

I am using WD drives too, so to hear that yours are nice and quiet is good.

Do you mind if I ask what fan you're using? Also, I'll need to think of some way to mount the fan so it moves air across the drives as there's not much room in the case I've got.

Valve
 
Stock Silverstone 12cm case fans x2 in the TJ-08 case (21dB). Plus the fan in the Seasonic S12 (silent) CPU fan from the AMD heatpipe at 1700 (silent) passive GFX card, 2 x HD's. Case fans are a bit airflow whoosy, if I can reduce them down to 10v should help a lot (at 7v fan mod not enough airflow)
 
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