I'm helping a friend with his first PC build. This will mainly be an office computer. He does have it hooked to a lazor engraver that he uses for his business. And he uses Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator to make the designs. And of course Microsoft Office and surfing the web. But he wants to install a Graphic Card...just because. He understands that the i5 3450 has the HD 2500, but he wants better. And there is the fact that a dedicated graphics card will take some of the load off the CPU. He did say that he might like to hook the PC up to his TV(s) via HDMI. He won't be doing any gaming at all. What should he get with a cost that is reasonable in mind? This is the mainboard: ASUS P8H77-V LGA 1155 Intel H77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard and he's got 16gb of G.Skil 1600 memory. The power supply is 430w Earthwatts by Antec. He's going with a 1tb Caviar Black paired with a 128gb Samsung 830 using Intel RST. Oh yeah, it being very QUIET is important. So only reasonably quiet cards please.
Hi there, I was doing some research for your question and came across this really cool link on the nvidia Geforce website that helps you choose check this link out. Help Me Choose I hope that helps you.
Look at the passive-cooling cards. they are lower end often, but a x4xx or x6xx radeon (you would probably want at least a 5xxx series for your purposes.) or comparable Nvidia would work good, i figure.
We are going with GT 440 with passive cooling http://usa.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/NVIDIA_Series/ENGT440_DC_SLDI1GD3/ http://www.amazon.com/ENGT440-DC-SL-DI-1GD3/dp/B0055FS1V0 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121469
