Half-height hold 'em?

[Drostie]

So, the first thing that should be gotten out of the way is that most of the budget cards look like half-heighters, though some of them have a longer brace that I like not at all.

Anyways. We've got ATI, nVidia, and Matrox in this market.

Matrox is offering their P650 at $250, which puts them as certifiably insane. They've always been supposedly the half-height leaders, but I guess they just got drunk on their own reputation here. Who knows, though? Maybe it'll benchmark better than an X800. Yeah, right. :roll:

Seriously, anyone got more info on the Matroxies? Because those things better be damn good if they think they can get $200 offa them.

Matrox's 128 MB card (yes, that $200 card was only 64 MB) retails for ~$700, and is called the "QID low profile."

ATI is being represented strongly by Sapphire and PowerColor. It looks like both brands are offering an X300SE LP for around $60 in their TurboCache lines. Not bad stuff.

And nVidia has a GeForce 6200 budget card which might be low profile; I've had trouble finding that one out. They also have the GeForce Go series for laptops, but I don't think anyone's retailing that chipset for half-height cards.

If anyone knows more than that about the half-height offerings that are out there, do tell. Benchmarks, more detail; anything would be helpful at this stage.

 

[Drostie]

bump

 

[biostud]

matrox = best 2D, and 2D only.

 

[Peter]

The correct term is "low profile". Quite a few cards come with either slot bracket in the box. Try PowerColor or Club3D (same company, different brands) for a choice of LP cards w/ ATI chips.

The Matrox QID is a 4-head card, no comparison with the normal stuff ...

 

[QurazyQuisp]

If you see an Nvidia EVGA card that could look like it's half-height, email their support, ususally they have a bracket it for it, and as soon as you register the product they'll send it to you for free. It's weird that they don't include them.

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: QurazyQuisp
If you see an Nvidia EVGA card that could look like it's half-height, email their support, ususally they have a bracket it for it, and as soon as you register the product they'll send it to you for free. It's weird that they don't include them.

I never used half-height cards, what kinda bracket do you need for it?

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: QurazyQuisp
If you see an Nvidia EVGA card that could look like it's half-height, email their support, ususally they have a bracket it for it, and as soon as you register the product they'll send it to you for free. It's weird that they don't include them.

I never used half-height cards, what kinda bracket do you need for it?

One that's - oh, half the normal height?

Peter is correct - and it seems like we both wind up finding threads about low-profile graphics cards.

Search "Low-Profile" in the Video forum archived threads, and you'll have more than you'll ever care to read.

- M4H

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire

Originally posted by: munky

Originally posted by: QurazyQuisp
If you see an Nvidia EVGA card that could look like it's half-height, email their support, ususally they have a bracket it for it, and as soon as you register the product they'll send it to you for free. It's weird that they don't include them.

I never used half-height cards, what kinda bracket do you need for it?

One that's - oh, half the normal height?
- M4H

Dont the cards still have to fit into a standard size expansion slot? Why would you need any brackets?

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: Drostie
So, the first thing that should be gotten out of the way is that most of the budget cards look like half-heighters, though some of them have a longer brace that I like not at all.

Anyways. We've got ATI, nVidia, and Matrox in this market.

Matrox is offering their P650 at $250, which puts them as certifiably insane. They've always been supposedly the half-height leaders, but I guess they just got drunk on their own reputation here. Who knows, though? Maybe it'll benchmark better than an X800. Yeah, right. :roll:

Seriously, anyone got more info on the Matroxies? Because those things better be damn good if they think they can get $200 offa them.

Matrox's 128 MB card (yes, that $200 card was only 64 MB) retails for ~$700, and is called the "QID low profile."

ATI is being represented strongly by Sapphire and PowerColor. It looks like both brands are offering an X300SE LP for around $60 in their TurboCache lines. Not bad stuff.

And nVidia has a GeForce 6200 budget card which might be low profile; I've had trouble finding that one out. They also have the GeForce Go series for laptops, but I don't think anyone's retailing that chipset for half-height cards.

If anyone knows more than that about the half-height offerings that are out there, do tell. Benchmarks, more detail; anything would be helpful at this stage.

if you think matreox is for gaming, you are insaine. matrox cards are for 2d quality and performance and allows you to hook 3 monitors to 1 card. also, they have the best multimonitor support out there. it is basically a workstation card company.

 

[gac009]

heh..."half heighters" even the link he provides call them "Low Profile" right there in the title.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: biostud
matrox = best 2D, and 2D only.

I believe that matrox card still has the 3d core of the parhelia, so it still has about geforce 3 level performance, though without the driver support.

 

[imported_Kensai]

I know you can get a low profile 9600(SE)

 

[Rock Hydra]

Don't expect anything too great. You won't be able to cool a very powerful GPU efectively in such a small Form factor.

 

[Peter]

... which is because you can't have RAM chips above the main chip on an LP card, only to the right of it. Thus, one can only make those half-bus-width cards like 9550SE, 9600SE, X300SE as ATi calls them, and euqally 64-bit-RAM versions of NVidia's. Limited heat dissipation in those low-volume cases is another reason.

 

[HDTVMan]

I used to buy low-profile cards but then found that prices on motherboards with integrated graphics chips like nforce2 were cheaper than the cards and gave better performance.