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[Pemalite]

Hiku said:

Impressive.
There is a market for this kind of card, but no one seems to pay attention to it.

There is a huge market for that kind of card... One that AMD and nVidia have ignored for years.

That's the HTPC market... But I guess the HTPC market has sort of shrunk over the years as everyone embraces stupid, horrible sound bars+internet streaming over a true surround sound solution using high quality UHD blu-rays. /rage

Go back to the recent year of 2010 I had an Intel Atom D550+2GB DDR3+256GB SSD. - Due to that motherboards PCI slot (Note: Note PCI-E) I dropped in a half-height, single slot, passively cooled Radeon 4350 512MB card. PCI. It actually performed alright, until it needed to stream anything from system memory.
http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-561.shtml

It was fine for video decode/encode and even light gaming. Overclocked like a champ as well, my other option was a Broadcom Crystal HD chip to handle that task, which my convertible netbook with an Atom processor had at the time.

Actually still got that PC, it's what I used to make my own pixel shaders to optimize Oblivion/Fallout/Bioshock to get maximum performance out of the system.

Over time I have cycled the hardware, upgraded, replaced, refined... But since the Geforce 1030 came out, that part of the system stayed the same... Because there is simply nothing really better in the half height, passively cooled, single slot market.

I can't even buy heatsinks for GPU's anymore to convert GPU's to passive like I used to with the Radeon HD 6670 which had half height designs.

I feel there is far less options in the low-end space... Even less options for us who like to modify their GPU's.

******

The other big market is actually the entry level market.

The CHEAPEST way to get into PC gaming is actually buying an old outdated Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation PC.
I.E. You can get a cheap Intel i5 10500 PC with 16GB of Ram for about $400 AUD or a i5 9500 for about $250 AUD... But they also tend to be Slim PC cases which will only accept a PCI-E half height card... And that is what really limits you.

I think the fastest Half Height card is the 4060 non-Ti with 8GB VRAM... But it's double slot and actively cooled.
But the market is flooded with Geforce 710's, 1030's and 3050's which are trash IMHO.

GPU market needs a correction, which isn't happening while nVidia's market cap stays ballooned and they continue to peddle to A.I.

Sorry. This was much more a ramble/tangent than I originally anticipated, I just hate the GPU market right now... Regardless of market segment. (High end over priced or non-existent low-end.)