November 11, 201510 yr A little background... I have 3 Radeon HD6450's in my unRAID box. Each one is currently passed-through to separate OE v6 VMs. One of them is also being used for retro gaming (RetroArch) within OE. This works great for NES, SNES, N64 and such but I want t beef things up a bit. So, I am going to ditch one of my OE VMs and build a WIN10 VM that will run both Kodi and HyperSpin. One of my HS wheels will be PC Games. Mostly everything that will be played will be Lego Star Wars and stuff like that (my 4 and 5 year old boys), but I wouldn't mind playing a little COD (not the newest) or BF2 every now and then. What vid card would you recommend? I'm looking at a budget of around $150 but the cheaper the better (I don't mind used equipment). Also, if even possible, I would prefer that it take up only a single PCI-E slot. And lastly, I want this thing to be a rock solid KVM performer...no weird "the card doesn't reset unless I reboot" kind of issues. EDIT: I should qualify this by saying that while the PCI-E sots in my server are all 16x form factor, they are also all 8x electrical. I know this is a pretty significant limitation but I'm not looking to set the world on fire. Honestly, the HD6450 plays Lego Jurassic World @ 1920 x 1080p pretty damn well. TIA! John
November 11, 201510 yr Author How about something like this: http://www.amazon.com/ViewMax-NVIDIA-GeForce-Express-EXTERMINATOR/dp/B00WNO327Y John
November 11, 201510 yr http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html They won't have much mention of kvm compatibility but you can search for that here after you've found the card in the right price range.
November 12, 201510 yr Geforce GTX 750 ti. Constantly gets praise for the best budget graphics card you can buy. Single slot! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127836
November 12, 201510 yr I was about to suggest a 750 Ti as well. Now you mentioned how you'd prefer the card to only take up a single PCI slot, but the 750 is a two slot height card. In fact, all GTX cards I believe are two slot height. You'd have to drop to the GT's I think to get 1 slot, and that's not really a good performer for the games you want to play.
November 12, 201510 yr Single slot 750 Ti's exist, but you'll pay a little more. https://www.techpowerup.com/206212/galaxy-intros-single-slot-geforce-gtx-750-ti-razor-graphics-card.html
November 13, 201510 yr Author Geforce GTX 750 ti. Constantly gets praise for the best budget graphics card you can buy. Single slot! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127836 That is much like the card that I linked above...single slot. BUT...with the way the fan sticks out, is it truly single slot? It may be a single PCI-E slot, but does the fan take up the headspace of the slot next to it? EDIT: I just looked up the specs on the vid card I linked and this is what it says: PCI Express or PCI Express 2.0-compliant motherboard with one dual-width x 16 graphics slot. I'm guessing that means that this card DOES take up the space of 2 PCIe slots. That being said, I wonder if I can make it fit in the first slot and hope there is enough room between the edge of the MB and the interior of the chassis. John
November 13, 201510 yr The card spencers linked is a true single-slot card. [ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127836 ] r.e. "... the PCI-E sots in my server are all 16x form factor, they are also all 8x electrical. I know this is a pretty significant limitation " ==> Not really. As long as your motherboard is at least PCIe v2 then 8 lanes will give you 4GB/s bandwidth, which is hardly a constraint on performance. And of course if your board has v3 slots, it's nearly double that You should, however, confirm that you have a large enough power supply to handle this card along with two others, as it draws a LOT more power than a 6450.
November 13, 201510 yr Geforce GTX 750 ti. Constantly gets praise for the best budget graphics card you can buy. Single slot! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127836 That is much like the card that I linked above...single slot. BUT...with the way the fan sticks out, is it truly single slot? It may be a single PCI-E slot, but does the fan take up the headspace of the slot next to it? EDIT: I just looked up the specs on the vid card I linked and this is what it says: PCI Express or PCI Express 2.0-compliant motherboard with one dual-width x 16 graphics slot. I'm guessing that means that this card DOES take up the space of 2 PCIe slots. That being said, I wonder if I can make it fit in the first slot and hope there is enough room between the edge of the MB and the interior of the chassis. John It doesn't look like it takes up two slots. It doesn't look like the cooler gets past the height of the backplane.
November 13, 201510 yr The card spencers linked is a true single-slot card. [ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127836 ] r.e. "... the PCI-E sots in my server are all 16x form factor, they are also all 8x electrical. I know this is a pretty significant limitation " ==> Not really. As long as your motherboard is at least PCIe v2 then 8 lanes will give you 4GB/s bandwidth, which is hardly a constraint on performance. And of course if your board has v3 slots, it's nearly double that You should, however, confirm that you have a large enough power supply to handle this card along with two others, as it draws a LOT more power than a 6450. I wouldn't call that card a single-slot card. It'll likely block an adjacent PCI(e) slot, no? In fact, it has the same depth (38mm) as a "true" dual slot video card.
November 13, 201510 yr It doesn't look like it takes up two slots. It doesn't look like the cooler gets past the height of the backplane. That's a Galaxy GTX 750 Ti Razor, it is a true single-slot card.
November 13, 201510 yr Author It doesn't look like it takes up two slots. It doesn't look like the cooler gets past the height of the backplane. That's a Galaxy GTX 750 Ti Razor, it is a true single-slot card. That is EXACTLY what I want but they look near impossible to find! Are there other similar cards (different vendor)?
November 14, 201510 yr I used a HD 7750 Ghost in my XEN config - this is the GDDR5 version http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=33396.0 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007Z3T5JC?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage This is only 2 tiers below the 750 Ti but 10 tiers above the 6450 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html If interested, make an offer as I no longer need a single slot card so switched to a R9 280... I'm traveling through Thursday though. DANG! I just noticed my sig post above has 7739 reads... sweet
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.