Recommend a GPU for a SFF PC

[Zoom7000]

A colleague of mine has been offered a Lenovo ThinkCenter M700 Small Form Factor PC as the main device for her school's IT refresh. However, the devices only come with the standard Intel 4600 GPU. Can anyone recommend a reasonably suitable GPU that will fit the small form factor case that will perform better than the built in Intel 4600.

 

The main usage for the PCs will be to run the Adobe Creative Suite of apps (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Premier Pro, Fireworks, Illustrator), the Serif Suite, Kodu, Blender etc.

[sted]

if your not in a hurry nvidias next line of gpus (pascal) is meant to be a lot smaller and colder than the current ones i believe

[ICTDirect_Dave]

To be honest, HD4600 is a decent enough baseline for those programs.

 

My stock work machine is a Thinkpad T430 at the mo. The stock Intel HD4000 GFX are more than good enough to run two 24" 1080p screens and let me play with Adobe CS-6 without being slow.

[dry]

Has your colleague specced SSDs for these? I'd focus on that if it's not already been requested tbh.

 

At my previous place we put bog standard cheapy-cheap Geforce 210s in our SFF PCs. They're half height and normally come with a half height adapter. They ran CS fine.

[just_david]

we used some small form factor gtx 750's that were pretty awesome, in small form factor dell 7010's.

 

Though we use standard intel 2000/2500 graphics for most of our PC's and they run adobe master collection and solidworks et all just fine

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Has your colleague specced SSDs for these? I'd focus on that if it's not already been requested tbh.

 

At my previous place we put bog standard cheapy-cheap Geforce 210s in our SFF PCs. They're half height and normally come with a half height adapter. They ran CS fine.

 

That would be a bit of a waste of time in this case as the 210 isn't as good as the on chip HD4600. UserBenchmark: Intel HD 4600 (Desktop 1.25 GHz) vs Nvidia GeForce 210

 

Though it's a good cheap (7 tear old) option if you need that hdmi connector.

[chris_uk]

A colleague of mine has been offered a Lenovo ThinkCenter M700 Small Form Factor PC as the main device for her school's IT refresh. However, the devices only come with the standard Intel 4600 GPU. Can anyone recommend a reasonably suitable GPU that will fit the small form factor case that will perform better than the built in Intel 4600.

 

The main usage for the PCs will be to run the Adobe Creative Suite of apps (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Premier Pro, Fireworks, Illustrator), the Serif Suite, Kodu, Blender etc.

 

Unless I'm mistaken by the model number you won't get anything to fit inside the case. Bar upgrading the RAM or the hard drive it doesn't look like you can do anything else with it.

 

 

We have the M73 Tiny (pictured) which looks pretty similar to: Small Form Factor PC Desktop: ThinkCentre M SeriesÂ| Lenovo UK

We have no problems running any of the CS6 apps, (i7, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD)

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Unless I'm mistaken by the model number you won't get anything to fit inside the case. Bar upgrading the RAM or the hard drive it doesn't look like you can do anything else with it.

 

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We have the M73 Tiny (pictured) which looks pretty similar to: Small Form Factor PC Desktop: ThinkCentre M SeriesÂ| Lenovo UK

We have no problems running any of the CS6 apps, (i7, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD)

 

 

The M700 does come in a SFF model: ThinkCentre M700 SFF Desktop | Powerful & Compact Enterprise DesktopÂ| Lenovo US

[sonofsanta]

Unles you're doing actual rendering, or game development, I don't think it's worth the money tbh. By the time you're getting an appreciable difference in performance you're spending £100 per machine. SSD would make more subjective difference to performance.

 

Kodu runs fine on IGP if you turn the DOF and Bloom and whatever other silly effects off, IME.

[VeryPC_Anthony_L]

If you are running programs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Premier Pro, Fireworks, Illustrator etc then a dedicated graphics card will certainly help more than just using the built in graphics. In built graphics are upto a certain point but when you start pushing a computer without a graphics card then it will be more sluggish.

 

We have recently been testing a new set up which is based on out Flex machine but that has a high quality graphics card in and all I can say is that it is AWESOME. If you are wanting to do media stuff then its the perfect machine.

 

Anthony

 

[3s-gtech]

Agreed with all of the above. We've put dedicated cards in some older machines with Intel IGPs (HP DC7800s, DC7900s and 8000s), the latter two of which run Solidworks so can use a little extra shove. Not much point in newer stuff, and these cards were £55 each so the cost of a good SSD. You need to do some testing with a single machine to see if it makes any appreciable difference, my guess would be 'not'.