best cheapo GPU for HTPC - fanless?

Tea_Bag

limitations:

preferably around the €40 mark or under,
preferably fanless,
from hardwareversand.de
no preference for ATI or nvidia.

what can you guys do for me?
im looking at a fanless HD5450 or an nvidia geforce 210? which is better? can i get better? it'll be used for movies (HD mkv's probably being the most demanding) and light internet browsing/youtube. nothing too taxing i hope, but i want it to be flawless at this. no stuttering. ive very little patience for lag/stuttering these days.

will be used with a 1080p 32" TV.

will i need to raise the budget a bit for much improvement?

thanks!

Leman

Does it HAVE to be from HWVersand?

Because Quiet PC http://www.quietpc.com/ie-en-eur/home kind of specialise in exactly what you are looking for :P

I personally would spring an extra tenner and grab a fanless 6450:
http://www.quietpc.com/ie-en-eur/products/vga-cards/sap-hd6450-1gb as it's a good 20% cooler (+1 to those who get the reference) than the 5450.

Tea_Bag

it doesnt have to be from HWVS no, i just specified there as im already paying postage from from them. delivery looks ok from quietpc so ill remember them in the future, but i can get that 6450 from HWVS for €10 less, so thats what ill be doing thanks alot.

besides cooling, is the 6450 just a cheeky rebranded 5450 with an overhauled power management to achieve the cooler chip?

Leman

Tea_Bag wrote: »

it doesnt have to be from HWVS no, i just specified there as im already paying postage from from them. delivery looks ok from quietpc so ill remember them in the future, but i can get that 6450 from HWVS for €10 less, so thats what ill be doing thanks alot.

besides cooling, is the 6450 just a cheeky rebranded 5450 with an overhauled power management to achieve the cooler chip?

No, not at all. While they are both 40nm GPUs (due to the 32nm fabs being canceled), the 6xxx series are a different make of chip to the 5xxx.

To quote Wikipedia, the 5450 is part of the "Evergreen" chipset while the 6450 is part of the "Northern Islands" family. As I said, they are similar due to being based off the same process, but they aren't nVidia style rebrandings.

marco_polo

Where as the performance of the 5450 was broadly similar to the 4350, the 6450 is much improved and pretty well the ideal HTPC card.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4263/amds-radeon-hd-6450-uvd3-meets-htpc/3

The last time we took a look at the HTPC market for a dGPU was with NVIDIA’s GT 430 in October. At that time it was the first low-end GPU with HDMI 1.4a and Blu-ray 3D capabilities, giving it an edge over AMD’s lineup at the cost of not supporting cadence detection for some more unusual patterns. The best AMD card for HTPC use at that time was the 5570, as the 5450 lacked the memory bandwidth and shader capacity necessary to make use of AMD’s full suite of post-processing features.

Due to how little time we’ve had with the 6450 we haven’t been able to run it through our full suite of HTPC tests, but so far it’s looking very good. Between the doubling of memory bandwidth and doubling of shaders, the 6450 is now able to run all of AMD’s post-processing features at full speed—that is they all work with Enforce Smooth Video Playback enabled and without dropping any frames in the process.

Tea_Bag

so it looks like that's the card for me. any NVIDIA alternatives @€;40ish from HWVS?

thanks for the help so far guys

marco_polo

Tea_Bag wrote: »

so it looks like that's the card for me. any NVIDIA alternatives @€;40ish from HWVS?

thanks for the help so far guys

I suppose the GT 520 is the closest match, there a few passive models in or around the €40 mark.

Considering passive models of slightly better 6450 are actually cheaper or the same price I'd probably go with the red team on this occasion though.