2012-05-25, 20:01
All;
I'm planning on moving my apple TV2 to the bedroom, and will be repurposing my existing server for xbmc.
I need to pick up a low profile card to fit my case; wondering about opinions.
I'd like to have a passive / fanless card; since this is going to be sitting in my living room. I don't intend to do a TON of gaming on this thing, and certainly nothing demanding, but being able to run something a handful of years old would be pretty awesome (thinking like Half-Life 2 / Portal on low settings, not a whole lot more then that). Will honestly end up being mostly emulators.
I'm looking at GeForce 210, GT 520 with 1GB memory, and GT 520 with 2GB of memory. There's a $10 difference between each step "up".
Is there that much of a difference between the three? Or, perhaps more accurately, how much of a difference will I notice between the 210 and the 520, or with that double amount of RAM? Is it worth the extra $20? I'm on a REALLY tight budget, so while $20 isn't much most of the time, I need to spend the absolute least I can get away with.
I suppose I should verify these will play HD movies (H.264), as well as pass audio via HDMI, right? That is more or less the critical piece, after all. I'm not doing any blu-ray decoding or anything. In fact, I don't even have an optical drive on this box.
Thanks in advance!
I'm planning on moving my apple TV2 to the bedroom, and will be repurposing my existing server for xbmc.
I need to pick up a low profile card to fit my case; wondering about opinions.
I'd like to have a passive / fanless card; since this is going to be sitting in my living room. I don't intend to do a TON of gaming on this thing, and certainly nothing demanding, but being able to run something a handful of years old would be pretty awesome (thinking like Half-Life 2 / Portal on low settings, not a whole lot more then that). Will honestly end up being mostly emulators.
I'm looking at GeForce 210, GT 520 with 1GB memory, and GT 520 with 2GB of memory. There's a $10 difference between each step "up".
Is there that much of a difference between the three? Or, perhaps more accurately, how much of a difference will I notice between the 210 and the 520, or with that double amount of RAM? Is it worth the extra $20? I'm on a REALLY tight budget, so while $20 isn't much most of the time, I need to spend the absolute least I can get away with.
I suppose I should verify these will play HD movies (H.264), as well as pass audio via HDMI, right? That is more or less the critical piece, after all. I'm not doing any blu-ray decoding or anything. In fact, I don't even have an optical drive on this box.
Thanks in advance!