Graphics Card for Photo Editing

[atr1981]

Hi Guys,

This may be the wrong thread so please move it if required.

My current PC is very loud and I want to make it quieter.

Most of the noise is from my beast of a grpahics card that was bought for PC gaming.

However, I don't do much of that now so can anyone recommend a graphics card that could be used for photo editing that doesn't have a huge wacking great fan on it ?

Thanks.

[tdodd]

You only need heavy duty GFX power for 3D games playing, or real time 3D graphics, when the card has to generate tens of frames per second with real time lighting, reflection and particle effects.

For photo editing, most of the time the screen just sits there unaltered for several seconds at a time, with only the odd mouse movement to deal with. In other words pretty much any old card will be fine.

I certainly have had no problem running Lightroom on a three year old PC with modest Radeon 9600 128MB fanless AGP GFX, driving a 1920*1080 display. I also had no problem running Lightroom on a 7 year old laptop with a 32MB Geforce2go GFX card driving a 1600*1200 monitor.

If you want to run multiple monitors and have something going on elsewhere with real-time screen refreshes then maybe you might need something a bit more meaty but for 2D photo editing alone almost anything will do.

Having said all that, I've just bought a Dell XPS 420 PC with Quad core processor, 2GB RAM, 1TB storage and an nVidia 8800GT card and that purrs away quietly in the corner of the room without causing any offence.

[atr1981]

Thanks,

Currently got a 7800GT but like I say it is very noisy.

Will look for something less powerful that can bo cooled with just a heatsink.

[tdodd]

Have you investigated underclocking the GFX card? I don't know whether it would help but maybe worth a shot.