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A Fanless Graphics Card from ASUS
mikemuch writes "ASUS has come out with the Extreme N6600GT Silencer/HTD, a GeForce 6600GT without any cooling fan. It's sort of odd looking, with heat sinks that fold on a hinge. Great for home theater since it's silent. Loyd Case of ExtremeTech has put it through a rigorous bunch of benchmarks."
But sometimes, you just want a little silence. For example, if you're building a home-theater PC, you'll want as quiet a system as possible.
;-)
Well, that would have been nice to be able to recommend when I wrote this article. I had also recommended an Asus GeForce 6600, albeit one that didn't cost quite as much. For myself (not being an audiophile), the cheaper card works fine as it rarely spins up to any noticable volume while I'm watching TV. I can understand, though, that for others the background noise can be very annoying.
As you can see, the card is actually designed to take advantage of a preexisting CPU cooling fan to blow air over the passive radiator. If you have a standard active cooling mount, then this is an innovative idea. But it does limit your choice of CPU coolers. For one thing, your processor heat sink can't be taller than the bottom of the card.
So what they're saying is that the ASUS Star Ice Jet Engine^W^W CPU Fan isn't going to work with this card? What a shocker.
(No, I won't let go of it. I've still got mine sitting on my desk, just so I can get all the "What the hell is that?" comments. )
Nvidia's upcoming Release 80 drivers include a number of enhancements for HDTV, including the ability to minimize overscan problems, something which has plagued home-theater PCs for years.
This reminds me, has anyone had any experience with this or any other HDTV-compatible cards that don't cost an arm and a leg? I'm still avoiding HD for now, but it's likely to catch eventually. To date I haven't seen too many inexpensive HDTV tuner cards. Then again, maybe I'm not looking hard enough?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Or you can just buy a cheap old 2D card with no 3D acceleration since all you are doing is rendering video!
Well, the problem with that solution is that the older 2D cards aren't fast enough to display the full screen rendering of high definition video. Granted, all we're doing is 2D, but at the point at which it's put into a home theater setup, the video card is taking most of the grunt work of decoding the video from the processor. At least, that was how I thought it was working these days.
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
You should keep your room cool (which you should do anyway when gaming because warmth will make you soperific and slow your reactions). You may also want to use a mosquito net or other gauze-like sheild to stop dust accumulating on your hardware.
No offense, but you are obviously not in the know of what it takes to run a HTPC. Upscailing DVD to HD with an upscaling such as ffdshow is extremely GPU intensive. I am running a 6600gt and it BARELY makes the cut for 1280 720p. I have read that a 6600 won't do 1080i, but a 6800 will.
Or you can just buy a cheap old 2D card with no 3D acceleration since all you are doing is rendering video!
... you and/or your kids aren't going to be mighty tempted to pop in a game or two?
So you've got this P4 class machine hooked up to a 60" hdtv screen with surround sound
Sorry. I don't buy that.
I run a completely fanless system. I used a fanless PSU, fanless CPU cooler (heat pipes), fanless graphics, fanless case. I run it with the case open. Not that expensive. Don't need water pumps because there is no water cooling involved. Just fanless parts with big heat sinks and pipes. I keep the air conditioning on in the house anyway so it is cool enough. In the winter, I just don't heat the computer room at all (the computers do it for me).
Meh.
I have a 6600gt with a fan in my main gaming machine, and I would not want to add that kind of noise - no matter how insignificant you may find it - to my home theater machine.
As such, I went with a fanless Asus FX5200. Turns out that the NVidia DVD/MPEG2 decoder does the best job on this decently powerful system as a PVR box. Plus, the less fans I have, the less "whoosh" noise. Which in a home theater/PVR environment is a necessity.
Karnal
Seconded, I've had motherboards from Gigabyte, Abit, Shuttle and Epox (and Asus of course) and I've always found the Asus boards to be excellent, both stable and with lots of excellent features.
Compared to the piece of shit Shuttle SN25P I recently had that kept destroying my RAID array I would certainly be interested to hear what the grandparent doesn't like about Asus motherboards.
If you want to get a really great image quality via an upscailing plug-in such as ffdshow, you most certainly need a high end gfx card. The 6600gt barely cuts it for 720p. I should know because I have one in my HTPC.
That must be some ass-bad programming, because I just tried scaling a DVD to full screen on a 2048x1536 display, and it worked perfectly well on a Rage 128, a Matrox Millenium II, and a Matrox G400, all of which are at least 4 years out of production. The r128 is in a machine with a 400MHz PowerPC, too. So if you are having trouble getting 720p output from modern hardware, your software is to blame.
There are some issues if you are trying to build a top-of-the-line system with the Asus boards. I own an A8N-E and with fast timed Corsair ram the board won't play nice. I would put the problem on Corsair (since they used to lie about their timings) but others have reported problems with other brands as well. I don't mean to say they make horrible products, I have been pretty happy with mine, but they have lost their outstanding reputation among enthusiasts which they had held for a long time.
I myself will never again recommend ASUS boards to any of my customers. Not only are they prone to small failures like being unable to read the CPU fan speed to crashing onboard components, but with the exception of one board (which I later found out *had* broken - it just wasn't important enough to count) almost every ASUS board I've used in both my machines and a co-worker's machines have intermitent "connection" problem with the Southbridge. I don't know how many times I got called out to figure out what was wrong with a Network or Audio card, and it turns out to be a faulty PCI bus. Thank you ASUS, you won't be gettin' any of my business ever again.
... Watch the failure rates on these puppies. No thank you!
And this video card with no fan, relying on *heatsinks* where other manufacturers recommend *water cooling*
I aim to misbehave.
MDA? You mean those where you can't even shift+pageup in the console, since it only has memory for 80x25 characters? Bah ... grow up man, get a Tseng ET4000. It's still the fastest card in the txt mode.
I totally don't game, so I have never researched video cards with that in mind. However, I have been interested in fanless video cards (with good Linux drivers). In my browsing, I looked a lot at the Jaton 3DForce Fx-5200LE (http://db.jaton.com/VGAProductDetail.aspx?P_ID=84 228L-T128MAO).
What would I be giving up? Efficient playing of video? Just 3D gaming? Just curious.
How does anyone keep all of this stuff straight?
Ok, everybody jokes about using a P4 as a heater. I am here to say that for the last two weekend, I did in fact use a P4 as a heater. I am remodling my home, and have removed all of the sheetrock and insulation from the Living Room/Dining Room/Kitchen. The Dining Room is where the only wall heater in the house is located. This means that running it would be useless. All of the heat would just go up through the attic, and out the vents. So, I closed the door on the bedroom, and ran my P4 3.2ghz laptap through the night. It doesn't compare to a real live heater, but it was enough to keep me comfortable.