One of my current cards for Linux/Windows PC is the nVidia Quadro K600 which I pick up from eBay for $30. Passive cooling might be an unnecessary restriction-and I speak as someone who hates noisy machines and installs Noctua heatsinks on all my CPUs. Even today open-source editing software like darktable benefits from a GPU with OpenCL. And it's likely to become more useful as time goes on. Though a basic GPU is not, IMO, terribly evil. I haven't yet seen any passive, low-cost graphics cards mentioned in this thread that are proven to be 4K/60Hz capable you may have to settle for some form of a lesser evil. Basically paying for all that power isn't useful if it isn't necessary for my computing. I suspect you could find a midrange graphics card with a large heatsink assembly to be so lightly loaded for the 4K tasks a passive card could ever do that it too would be silent nearly all of the time. The fans spin quietly at low rpm for moderate loads, and go hurricane for some 4K games. Right now, web browsing or light photo editing on a 4K screen, my RTX 3080 is dead silent. So, does anyone know of a card that will do 4K at 60hz, is passively cooled and doesn't cost like it will take a gamer to gaming heaven? Thanks in advance for any experience you can share.Ĭounterintuitively perhaps, a large, powerful graphics card with multiple fans and a big heatsink can be very quiet (indeed, silent) when it's only lightly loaded.
