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Anyone know of a list of watts used by various pcie nvidia gfx cards, low end - i'm looking to put one into a myth tv box thats going to be on permanently so the lower the better really. Was thinking about a 7300LE or similar, or are they all going to be around the 20W mark?
Nox
I switched from a 6600GT to a 6200LE, and it really made very little difference (couple of watts, difficult to measure on my good quality mains monitor anyway).
The card only consumes lots of power when doing 3D work, if you are just displaying movies then all cards of a particular generation tend to have the exact same media unit and the display driver will underclock and generally power-save the unused 3d unit to conserve power.
In theory a passive 8400 or 8500 is the best card to go for, but I don't know if Linux can make good use of the media hardware in there yet.
I personally have used 6200LE (it was on special offer on Scan for 14 quid) and integrated 6150 graphics with freeview decoding under Myth and they work fine and have passive cooling.
Looking like the 7300 then thanks! tho the 7600 is pretty close too.
Nox
i'm running sabayon and it picked up the 8700M GT in my laptop fine, was quite suprised! How well it actually uses it tho is another matter! Will take a look at a passive 8400 price wise, seem to remember nvidia stripping something from its 8 series that you now had to buy instead, atleast under windows.
Nox
The 8800 does not have a media unit, and Nvidia seem fine with that on the grounds that people with such an expensive card will have a capable CPU that can do all decode in software anyway.
All the low end cards should have the same media unit.
Once again useful info from Anandtech.
I can say the 7100GS is hopeless if you're trying to view media (well, through media center anyway) full screen if your desktop is at 1920x1200. It just can't cope without tearing the image. Knock the res back even a touch and it copes, so it's right on the edge. I'm going to replace mine with a HD2400Pro when I can find one which includes a low profile bracket.
//edit: should say that's in XP. In Vista a few months back it was worse, as the Vista drivers were utterly hopeless.
I think a 8400gs may do the trick?!
7600GS are about 30W, surely that's good enough and there's a bit of 3D power there if you need it. Passively cooled versions are available and you should pick one up for £45-50 if you shop around.
A 7300 will do fine, the only way mythbox uses the GPU is for an OpenGL overlay, and it can handle that just fine. Mythbox hasn't evolved to a point as to where it can GPU offload encoding tasks, so spending more on anything more fancy is a waste of time, power consumption, and money. See here for an idea of where you should place your money: http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Executive_Overview