The lowest power consuming VGA card possible

shhhhhhhh · Post by **shhhhhhhh** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 6:25 pm

#1 - Great site! I've spent a lot of time reading on here in the last few days.

#2 - I'm looking for some help on choosing a video card.

Requirements:
a. PCI or PCIe
b. FreeBSD drivers (nvidia)
c. really, really, low power usage

I'm putting this into a FreeBSD system that will seldom actually "need" VGA for any reason. If the mobo had integrated video, it would be overkill. In fact, if the motherboard had a serial port, I'd set up comconsole and not bother with VGA at all. Since it has neither, buying a cheap VGA card is more generally useful than a serial card (VGA is usable with KVM carts, accessing BIOS, etc.).

$9 - Serial port:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6815166003

The difficulty I am having is finding a really low power VGA card. I don't need high end features (3D, etc) but the card should work well with FreeBSD. Nvidia actually has drivers for FreeBSD, so that is my "brand" of choice. Nvidia FreeBSD driver supported cards:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_18897.html

Beyond that, I care primarily about power usage at idle. The one really useful link I found in that regard was:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000662.html

Which shows the GeForce 7300 GS at 9W. Perhaps that's as low as I can realistically expect? What about older (even much older) video cards? Would an older GeForce use even less juice? Perhaps a mobile edition? Buying off eBay is fine, I just don't know exactly what I'm looking for.

pipperoni · Post by **pipperoni** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 6:54 pm

If this system will seldom need a monitor, do you still need proper driver support? I would find a really really old video card (I have an ATI 4MB card, so low powered it doesn't even have a heatsink) which I use in situations you have described. Just run everything at 640x480 and you don't need a driver. You could try ebay'ing terms like "1mb video card pci" (or 2mb, 4mb, etc).

kater · Post by **kater** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 11:20 pm

I'd say 7300GS is really as low as you cen get. See here too. Judging by heatsink size one could even say that newest audio cards dissipate more heat

AFAIK 7300GS is made in 110 nm and in 90 nm versions - but I may be wrong on that. The 90 nm version should be running on even less juice, but I doubt the practical difference will really matter.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:05 am

maybe 7100GS would use less? it's made on a bigger process(110nm) but core clock is lower.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:24 am

if a 7300gs idles at 9w, why do you need anything less than that? thats less than a hard drive pulls.

9w is really really low

you planning on running this thing on batteries or somthin? why do you need anything less than 9w?

jojo4u · Post by **jojo4u** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:58 am

9 W is hilariously much. A notebook with screen off needs less in idle. I'd also go for a fanless ATI Rage 128 or a Radeon 7000.

EDIT: This is of course only if you wish to fire up X and work with it.

jb_ · Post by **jb_** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:59 am

pipperoni wrote:If this system will seldom need a monitor, do you still need proper driver support? I would find a really really old video card (I have an ATI 4MB card, so low powered it doesn't even have a heatsink) which I use in situations you have described. Just run everything at 640x480 and you don't need a driver. You could try ebay'ing terms like "1mb video card pci" (or 2mb, 4mb, etc).

Exactly... A geforce 7 card is overkill when a crappy old PCI vga card from the Pentium 2 era will suffice and will have much lower power consumption too.

(Hint: if it's made by Cirrus Logic or Tseng Labs then it's old & crappy enough!

)

shhhhhhhh · Post by **shhhhhhhh** » Wed Apr 04, 2007 11:22 am

eBay, $7 shipped, ATI Mach64 VT.

I had forgotten about the old ATI Mach & Rage cards, the Matrox, and the S3 cards. A few reminders was all I needed.

Thanks guys! I'll post a description of my frankenstein once I get it finished. It's primary use is a gigabit connected NAS. It will also run rsnapshot for incremental offsite backups of my web server. And I'll likely do bit of development work on it to justify using a Meron CPU instead of a VIA or Pentium M. And it'll do all that without being heard...or so goes the plan.

Matt

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Mon Apr 09, 2007 7:42 pm

Matrox is my bet. their 2d video quality is unparalleled. I own a pci version of the 550. sick card. totally passive, but you could go lower than that for even less wattage I guess (duno why you'd bother though... )

The lowest power consuming VGA card possible

The lowest power consuming VGA card possible

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