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It's time for my shuttle to retire to under the tv. It will live out the rest of it's days feeding video to a 22'' crt tv. That being the case, the whiny little fan on my gainward 6600gt is starting to annoy me. I'd like to get a quiet active/passive cooler for it, but my clearance is VERY limited (ie anything deeper than the original heatsink/fan is gonna cause problems). Any sugguestions, or should i get a crappy €30 passive card?
Just get the cheapest passive card out there, something like a geforce 5200, 6200 etc. These start at about £20 brand new.
It sounds like your not gonna be doing anything in HD (due to CRT TV), so you dont need vga power for that. Unless you wanna play games on it theres no need for anything other that the lowest of the low end cards.
Some of the cheap cards have composite video out, some are S-video. Just make sure you get the right one for your TV.
I use an Nvidia 6200LE (PCIe) on a Linux based Mythtv box, does a fine job and the AGP versions are faster than that. There are passive 7600GS/7300GT boards out there as well for about 50 quid if you want to push the boat out.
I used an old passive ATi 9250SE in my HTPC. Runnning vga -> vga to my LCD. I've no need for anything with anymore power. You probably don't either.
The biggest decider for you will probably be the size of the heatsink and whether its got s-video out etc