I am looking for a bit of advice on graphics cards with the following properties:
PCI-Express
Card will only be running 2 displays at a maximum of 1920x1200 resolution.
24" screens require DVI input to run the displays at maximum resolution.
The DVI cables will be up to 10m long
All graphics cards are 3D but the card only needs minimal 3D performance as the display charts will only be 2D.
The combined systems will be running the following hardware:
Intel D975BX2 motherboards
Core 2 Duo E6700 (pre-December 08) or E7300 (post-December 08)
4GB ram (in 1gb sticks for redundancy)
2 x WD 320GB drives (pre-December 08) or 2 x WD 640GB Green drives (post-December 08) both drives configured as RAID1
Secondary network cards, multi-channel serial cards, and 2 PCI data sampling cards complete the build.
The hardware is installed in both 4U rack mount cases AND standard desktop pc cases.
We are currently using a mix of NVidia cards from 6600GT's up to 8800GT256, and from this i can say that each card poses problems.
An ideal situation would be something like a passively cooled NVidia 9400, with dual DVI which would be more than sufficient but i haven't been able to find one with dual DVI connectors. I would like to keep temperatures down to a minimum, with a PCI-E bus powered card (ie no additional 6/8 pin power), and a fanless design if possible so there are no moving parts.
Any advice or suggestions you can offer would be most appreciated.
That's very similar to the Gigabyte 8600 GTS Silent Pipe 3 which i've tried, unfortunately it was running at over 103degC in our cases, which is just a bit too hot. (Ambient was about 30degC)
That's one of the reasons i was hoping for a lower model GPU like the 8400.
Now it may well be the case that there simply isn't anything available, running on just passive cooling but i am hoping someone can prove me wrong on this one.
I don't know if it will do but maybe something like the ATI 3650 which had some silent edition (don't know if they still available). Something like this
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