Maximum PC

Straight to the point, are video card makers embracing small form factor yet or are they still pushing high end to the point of suffication? Will AMD's HD7750 or anything from nVidia's next set have a home in an actual low profile iTX build? With all this talk about shrinking dies and saving power, I find it sad that there's still very few cards that really seem to be aimed for these hefty goals. I'm going through the house and really finding that I can have every PC in an iTX box, but the video card is the limiter.

Maybe a back story to why this question seems like a rant: I entered 2012 simplifying computing in our home as a goal in 2011. Everything's Win7 Pro 64, everything is s1155, everything is basically a simple box, and finally lean fully on WHS(2) and a strong wired/PoE/fiber network for actual storage that typical big drives are need for. Great, grand...but what about gaming? I still find I need a larger than wanted box for a video card of any kind over average. They're all full slot even if they say "low profile" on the box.

So I'm basically stuck with a Sapphire 6670 as the ONLY video card I can purchase for a real iTX build. To chose any other card has the case getting bigger and bigger and defeating the purpose of being iTX in the first place. mATX isn't really physically small, and iTX cases have followed suit by being the same size as a mTX for the soul purpose of holding a decent full sized video card.

/end rant. Do any of you see anything on the horizon that will fit in an Antec ISK-300? My build is "fine" now, but surely not going to replace a tower anytime soon. Not expecting top end for epic uber ultra Master Sargent performance, but if a couple GTX 260's use to fly well on three 23" screens in a tower, am I stuck with a 6670 for a couple years? I sure would like to see something as capable as a GTX 460 in this form factor.

Low profile is probably going out of style for the following:

• Thermal constraints. Even midrange video cards generate quite a bit of heat. Considering they get less room for both air and heatsink space, it's not feasible.
• Size constraints. Higher end graphics cards need a lot of power management circuitry mostly to keep the power hungry GPU happy. I would say if you took a GTX 460 and narrowed it down to Low profile size, you'd run into a long video card issue.
• Hardware constraints. A lot of SFF power supplies can't output more than 300W. And probably can't output more than that given the space. You could probably run a moderately powerful system on it, but it'll put a lot strain on it and kill it faster.

Also the ISK-300 is a horrible choice for gaming for all of the above (too small to breath, nothing would fit, and highest output power supply is 150W), at least, if you wanted GTX 460 level performance. In fact, it's more designed for Intel Atom and AMD Brazos. The only cases that were designed with gaming and Mini-ITX in mind are the SilverStone SG series, Fractal Array, and a lot of Lian-Li cases (they don't have a consistent name or series), which you pointed out, are too big for you.

I should also point out that small form factors weren't meant to house high-performance beasts in the first place.

I agree, SFF video cards are going out of style now that Intel's HD 2000-4000 gpu cores on the cpu work pretty damn good for a light HTPC setup; specially in an ITX slim case. Plus AMD's APU's with the mid range 6520's aren't too bad either. My biggest complaint is that Intel is only pairing their new HD 4000 gpu's on the more expensive cpu's, in which most people would bypass because we'd use discrete gpu's... I don't know why they didn't include it on the lower end chips that would benefit from such technology.

If you need more GPU power, then you have to look at the full sized ITX SFF cases like what Latios mentioned.


And they never had half height mid range gaming cards, there's just no market for this; plus space, power and cooling requirements come into question considering you can only have 75w coming from the pcie lanes... if you had that amount of power for the gpu alone. Some ITX slim cases use the 60-90w laptop bricks, or even up to 150w bricks. You can look at augmenting your setup with a higher powered 192w picoPSU unit, but its kinda pricey.

The only way to get high powered, small form factor gpu's into something like an ITX slim size is using the crazy expensive mobile chips on the MXM standard. There's a few desktop/nettop companies, but its all pretty expensive again. I forget the name of the company that anandtech uses to test out MXM cards for benchmarking, but its essentially a laptop component fixed to a desktop chassis.

But then again, the gtx 570m is less than half the speed of the desktop 570. So, realistically, you are going to spend something like $300-400+ for a 460 level performance... assuming you can even source the part.

There's a lot of if's, but I think the reason why Intel includes the HD4000 on the higher end parts anyway is because QuickSync boosts the CPU compute performance to no end. Though I wonder why you couldn't just use the discrete GPU (maybe the CPU knows how to schedule instructions properly for the integrated GPU?). Otherwise, the if's mostly include if Intel is confused on what they really want on their graphics side. They seem to want to gobble up the lower end market, but as you said, they're not doing it right.

Only for gpu accelerated applications that can use it like HD video decoding/transcoding, like quicksync was designed to do. It doesn't help with any cpu related computations. Right now, most sandy bridge versions (mobo's depended) will disable the gpu core of the Intel HD's when you use a discrete card automatically and have your monitor plugged into the discrete card.


You can, but I believe it maybe limited to what chipset you have to be able to do this.

Lucid Virtu allows you do sync your monitor to the HD 2000+ and a discrete card (Lucid Virtu software overview), just like nvidia mobile optimus for laptops; in theory to save power when the discrete gpu goes idle, it would literally shut it off, transfer gpu to Intel's gpu seamlessly. Also, you can still have discrete card gpu acceleration for gaming when you have the monitor plugged into the HD 2000+ gpu.

There's also limitations to the software as it may not work with all games and it has trouble with some DX11 features like tessellation. But the thing is that most modern gpu cards already have sophisticated power management and power savings mode that it really nullifies the tricky software/hardware handling for such a setup, specially when you are talking about big expensive cards only taking what 15w at idle? Plus the software can't completely shut down the entire pcie gpu lanes yet to save power like nvidia optimus can, so its hard to justify taking the small performance hit just to save a few watts at idle.