Silent gfx card upgrade?

[charlesr]

I currently have an NVidia Geforce 6200 Turbocache omg with silent heatsink.

My monitor is a 4:3 1280x1024 vga only.
I have Windows7 64bit and an i5

For normal stuff (browsing, flash, vids) will there be any noticeable difference between what I have now and this silent ATI HD5450?

[Hohum]

There are a few benefits if you bought that card:

• Hardware acceleration for video playback
• Hardware acceleration for flash content (just video at the moment, but eventually all flash content supposedly)
• Direct2D/Directwrite support, which will soon be used in web browsers to hardware accelerate the display of web pages (Firefox 4 Beta 5 currently has this feature, other browsers very soon)
• Supports all DirectX versions currently available, so uses the WDDM 1.1 driver model - this saves you a chunk of RAM usage when on the desktop as data can be stored on the graphics card alone and updated/retrieved accordingly (as opposed to your current DX9 card which uses WDDM 1.0, and requires a copy of data in both system and graphics RAM)

[charlesr]

Great. thanks.

I don't play games on my PC. Is there any point in spending more (note it has to be silent)?

[abigsmurf]

Having a DX10 card will cause fewer headaches in the future, even if you're not really doing any gaming. IE9 for example wants DX10 for GPU acceleration.

It's not worth spending a great deal if you don't expect to game at all (not that you'd get any gaming cards with passive cooling that could be safe from overheating issues).

[Hohum]

Great. thanks.

I don't play games on my PC. Is there any point in spending more (note it has to be silent)?

Nope. Also, that link you posted to is the 1GB version, which is a total waste of time. Get the cheaper 512MB version, which can be had for around £40.

Edit: Such as... http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=GX-118-HT

[charlesr]

I love you guys. Ordered that.