Budget card recommendation (x800xl upgrade) fanless?

[jozi]

I upgraded my pc some 6 months ago and at the time I didnt have enough in my budget for a new gfx card.

I'd like to upgrade it now to something a bit better thats either fanless or practically silent. I'm way out of touch as you might have guessed by me still using a x800xl

What are your suggestions? What do I look for spec wise these days?

Current spec is:
Win7 Enterprise 64bit
Athlon II X3 440
ASUS M4A87TD/USB3, AM3, ATX
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair DDR3 PC3-10666
64GB Crucial RealSSD C300
2TB Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen SATA 3Gb/s
Optiarc SATA DVD drive
SB XFI Elite Pro PCI card
Antec Solo case
Samsung 22" monitor 1680*1050 resolution

I'm not so much interested in gaming any more, I'd be more inclined to run this to a tv/projector for watching movies, I might do the odd bit of 2D autocad and some Revit 3D modeling - both very infrequently and both are fine now as is, any speed increase is a bonus for revit. Budget is as low as possible, I'd say below 100euro if at all possible for a fanless card. I had a quick scan of a few reviews and the 2 cards that caught my eye were the ati 6670 which runs a fan and the 5570. The 5570 being mch cheaper and I couldnt find a 6670 without a fan. I'm totally out of touch and no idea to what nvidia has to offer, this looked interesting but probably not a very powerfull card GT 430?

I can also see a thread for case/cpu fans coming now

[boost]

I took a quick look and even found a 5750 passive for under 100€. It has two DVI ports which could be a bonus.
The 440GT is the fastest nVidia model I could find.
I don't know which card will accelerate your 3D modeling program.

[CA_Steve]

Autocad and Revit don't use the GPU for acceleration - only the CPU. However, your choice of video card will have an impact on how fast it displays what it has rendered. Found this FAQon Revit.

So, get a card with 1GB or more of Video RAM and make sure it's GDDR3 or GDDR5 and not DRAM.

Oh, here's the exception to the rule. Indigo Render 3.0 will use GPU acceleration.

[SebRad]

Hi, the thread linked by CA_Steve suggest nvidia cards might be less trouble than AMD ones.
If you can stretch as far as a GTS 450 the MSI Cyclone (£100 at time of posting) might be worth a look:
Edit - B Grade one on overclockers.co.uk for £80!

Fan Noise - from HardOCP review

To put it simply, the fan on the MSI N450GTS Cyclone is virtually silent under idle conditions, and under load conditions. To even hear the fan, we had to manually take control over the fan speed and turn it up to above 75%. Under normal conditions, especially if the video card is installed inside an enclosed chassis (rather than mounted to a Torture Rack), it is hard to imagine it would be audible at all over all of the other cooling fans in the typical gaming PC.

The cooling fans on the ATI video cards [HD5750 & HD5770] weren’t what we would call loud, but they weren’t silent either. They were audible over about 40% speed, but it was not an unpleasant sound. Compared to the fan on the MSI N450GTS Cyclone, however, they were much more easily detectable.

The [MSI Cyclone] GTS 450 may well be over-kill for your needs so the 440 you linked could be better.

Performance
440 = 128 cores/shaders/thingies @ 810 for £75
450 = 192 cores/shaders/thingies @ 850 for £100

Memory bandwidth
440 = 128bit x 1600MHz GDDR3 (dual 800MHz)
450 = 128bit x 4000MHz GDDR5 (quad 1000MHz)

The GTS450 should be loads faster, if Revit or any games you might play can take advantage!

Regards, Seb