powering off gpu? low power pc?

kaitanium

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Aug 18, 2011
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Been trying to find a way to operate a low(er) power, small 65W i7 mini itx pc (or an atx) but with the capabilities of a GPU. The only way it seems is to get a vidock or something similiar but at 1x speed over expresscard it seriously limits what the gpu can do. Plus there seems to not be any good desktop expresscard pci cards to take the unit so it seems like an external gpu is out of the question.

Any ideas? Or such a thing doesnt even exist? Any ways to shut off the gpu and use onboard graphics? Trying to replace my honking large gaming unit since i dont play as many games anymore and rather have the space
 
At idle most GPUs draw very little power, most of them are ~10W at idle which is a great improvement over several years ago.

There are a bunch of mini-ITX boards that have full blown PCI-e slots, best one i found when looking around earlier was the Asus H97I-Plus, its got a full PCI-e port so you can run a full GPU in it and let the GPU kick down to idle clocks when not needed.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132123
 
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