Passively cooled AGP video cards

[schmosef]

Anybody know of any manufacturer models of AGP video cards other than Gigabyte that are passively cooled and would be Vista compatible?

Gigabyte is the only brand I've found that has these but they are hard to get.

[Nowhere]

...Matrox?

[Taz]

Would this do?

[lowlifecat]

vista compatible is a pretty harsh term. the question is what is your budget and how vista compatible do you wanna go?

quoting from wiki

Graphics hardware requirements

While Windows Vista's "Basic" and "Classic" interfaces will work with virtually any graphics hardware that supports Windows XP or 2000; most discussion around Vista's graphics requirements centers on those for the Windows Aero interface.

During Vista's early testing stages, the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 were the only cards compatible with Windows Aero. Since then, support has been extended to most DirectX 9 graphics cards; as of Vista Beta 2 the NVIDIA GeForce FX family and later, the ATI Radeon 9500 and later, Intel's GMA 950 integrated graphics, and a handful of VIA chipsets and S3 Graphics discrete chips are supported.[35] Though some XGI Technology Volari chips were DirectX 9 (including the Volari V3XT which was available in PCI cards), with XGI's exit from the graphics card business it appears none of its chips are supported as of Vista Beta 2.

Microsoft has not specifically stated whether an AGP or PCI Express (PCIe) video card is a requirement for Windows Aero, but they recommend PCIe video due to their greater bandwidth[citation needed]. There are still some PCI cards available that are compatible with Windows Vista:

* According to NVIDIA, the GeForce FX 5200, FX 5500, FX 5700 LE, and 6200 (see below), all of which will work with Windows Aero, are available in PCI cards.[36]
* BFG Technologies and its 3D Fuzion division state that their GeForce 6200 PCI cards, the only PCI cards with that GPU to date, are Vista-ready.[37][38]
* In June 2006 an ATI Radeon X1300-based PCI card was made available in Japan.[39]

i just did a look see at TD for 256m AGP cards, i found almost a dozen dx9 passively cool cards that should be able to handle vista.

i liked this HIS Radeon X1300 / 256MB GDDR2 / AGP 8x / DVI / VIVO/ Crossfire Ready / Video Card passive cooling ~120$ca.

there are nv6200 for as low as 50$ca, and ati9550 from 70$ca - 120$ca. there is a ati aiw2006 edition for 146$ca.

[DGhost]

I have an ATI 9550 256MB Card at home that is passively cooled and works beautifully with Vista. It could readily drive two 1280x1024 displays during the non performance optimized Beta 1. I am willing to bet that it would be more than enough with the current optimized drivers.

Downside is it chokes if you ever try to run a game. Upside is that the graphics requirements are really minimal for Vista - it mostly crawls due to lack of driver/software optimization. Biggest thing people were upset about is the fact that their Radeon 8xxx or GeForce 3/4 series cards wouldn't run it... but when you consider that I bought an ATI 8500 about 5 years ago... Not too far apart from when I got the Parhelia...

Outside of that... the biggest problem is that Intel just recently put out a chipset that would support it. It would have been nice if their last generation integrated graphics (which is now driving most of the laptops on the market) to support it, but....

[schmosef]

I think I'm going to pick one of these up tomorrow:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2070201&CatId=2234

[schmosef]

Well... I bought the above card and it works really well...

Now my Matrox P650 PCI card is acting up. The HF drivers don't seem to like working along side the nVidia drivers and the SE drivers won't install because they don't detect the card.

D'oh!

I'm about to RMA the PCI card because I discovered that the fan was dead. I've posted about the incompatibility problem on the Matrox Tech Support forums so hopefully they'll have some advice for me by the time I get my card back.