illusionuk Wrote:When reading general reviews - ATI seem to win against performance, picture quality and overall more bang for your buck. Although from what I have gathered ATI is not recommended against a Live build; Nvidia drivers are better...?
I'm looking for a low-profile fan-less card to use.
I've used 2 fanless low-profile cards:
An ATi based one, the HIS HD5550 Silence:
And a Nvidia based one, the Sparkle fanless GT430 (SXT4301024S3LNMP)
Feature-wise (read: the things you mentioned that you don't really need), they would probably both be a good match. But that is purely on features.
I did not compare the cards
directly image quality wise, but as far as I can tell there were no real differences.
Both were (are) used with Ubuntu 10.10 x64. I started out with the HD5550. Installation/getting it to work was no problem (compiling xbmc with VAAPI support, applying surface patch, installing external libs etc) - it just required some reading. Currently it would probably even be easier to have that card working. There are precompiled XBMC versions with VAAPI enabled, the surface patch is part of recent builds now etc. etc. The only thing that I didn't like, was that the card didn't (doesn't?) support MPEG2-HD hardware acceleration. But that was not what made me switch to the Sparkle fanless GT430.
The reason I bought the fanless GT430 was because the HIS did *not* respect the low-profile standards! The heatsink was just a few millimeters higher than the bracket, but enough to
not make it fit in my case (Ahanix MCE-301).
The sparkle card was the only card I could find (at the time) that seemed to *really* fit the low profile standards. Setting it up was -in my view- not
soooo much more easier than the ATI card. It was maybe handy that all things came sort of precompiled, but the few extra steps taken for an Ati card are (in my opinion) not that much to worry about (unless you really don't like to read a bit in to things - which you would have to do anyway when never have worked with linux for example). What I do like very much about the GT430 card is that it accelerates quite some more than the HD5550 it seems.
A bit of summary:
- Not all low-profile cards *are* low-profile. If your prefered case needs real low-profile cards, pay attention to that
- Ati based solutions *currently* do not seem to HW acc. as much as Nvidia based solutions - if that matters depends on what you need
- Ati versus Nvidia 'setup' (getting it to work) is a non-issue in my view
- Image quality can best be viewed personally, I didn't detect any (but didn't compare directly)