Question New Fanless Low Profile Cards?

radlord

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May 11, 2021
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Hi all, I’ve had to buy a DDR5 GT1030 for my HTPC to allow 4K.

Seems a bit of a waste to spend £100 on such an old card, but so be it.

Do we think there’ll ever be a low end version of a modern architecture like the 40 or 50 series that allows going down to the level you could get away with a low profile fanless graphics card?

You can get a fanless 1650, or a low profile 1650, but not both. A 1630 might have been nice.

I know everyone uses chromecast sticks etc these days but surely there must be a market for something like this every few years? The 1030 is 6 years old now after all.
 

Eximo

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I swapped my passive GT1030 for an A380 just for experimentation. Contemplated putting a different cooler on it, it likes to pulse on for a few seconds and then shut off when playing multimedia content. Not really audible though.

Well, the market is probably too small for a passive GPU. Ryzen G series chips and even late model Intel Iris and Xe onboard graphics can really fill the role. And for the person that wants a multimedia PC, there are those tiny sub-NUC ones like the Larkbox. Even then, their pricing is a little high.
 
The chances are pretty slim, since the performance of IGP has increased so dramatically with DDR5 system memory. Intel's Raptor Lake UHD770 IGP is about as fast as your Silent GT1030, and on the front page right now AMD's upcoming 780M APU IGP is impressively almost as fast as nVidia's discrete laptop GTX 2050

With IGPs like this for as low as $40 more than a "F" model CPU, the market for such low-end GPUs in the future is going to be vanishingly small. That's really too bad as it would be nice to upgrade the hardware acceleration as newer formats become popular.

For example your GT1030 can hardware accelerate H.265 or VP9 up to 8k, but Youtube is switching everything over to AV1 so if you want to watch 4k Youtube videos your CPU soon will have to decode all of it in software and may struggle. While if you had a RTX 3050 it could decode AV1 in hardware (but at 115-130w that's definitely not going to be fanless or low profile).

Given that kind of gaming performance isn't required for HTPC, a GT3030 or 3010 sure would've been nice. But I don't expect any 5030 or 5010 is forthcoming either.
 

Eximo

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Youtube is switching everything over to AV1 so if you want to watch 4k Youtube videos your CPU soon will have to decode all of it in software and may struggle.

One of the reasons I got the A380. The ASRock card doesn't support HDMI 2.1 sadly, but that isn't super important right now.

AV1 decoding without having to buy a full up gaming card is worth the minor bugs they are still working out. Latest driver got rid of the Arc overlay and replaced it with a normal windowed app.

As I mentioned, I might measure the mount on the A380 and see if I can mount a big passive cooler to it.
 

radlord

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May 11, 2021
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Do they even sell reduced-wattage CPUs like the 4590T (35W) I have in my current fanless build anymore?

I’d like to be able to at least reuse the expensive heatsink case I bought when I eventually upgrade.
 

Eximo

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Yes, they are usually expensive.

12100TE - 35W 4Ghz
12100T - 25W-69W 4.1Ghz
12100 -60W-89W 4.3Ghz.

You can take a regular CPU and set artificial limits on it.

I'm running a 4770k at 35W or something like that, max boost 3.6Ghz, all core 3.0Ghz. Gets the job done as a media PC. I will likely replace it soon with an i3-12100 or something. ITX board costs have finally started to come down for Intel.
 

simfreak101

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Nov 3, 2017
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i have a lenovo m720tiny ryzen5 velcro'ed to the back of the tv and thats more than enough. Never hear the fan. The newer ones are even better; Currently i have mine connected to a 65" 4k LG OLED with HDR;
Normally you can pick them up for about $500-$600; I found this to be cheaper than constantly trying to build my own mini-itx system;
I will say the only restriction is the 8GB of ram; So if you browse on it, you might have to kill chrome from eating up all your ram.