Question What's the current "low Wattage" graphics king?

[DAPUNISHER]

PCIe 3.0 x8

Where do you see that?

 

[MrTeal]

Out of curiosity, do you have a soldering station and are handy with it? Looking at the Wyse 5070, there's a spot there for a PCIe x4 and the same motherboard in the Wyse 5070 Extended has that installed.
Not saying it'd work out of the box, but I'd be pretty tempted to toss in an x4 connector and see if it automagically works.

 

[MrTeal]

So, curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to see just what kind of performance hit we'd be looking at.
I have an old HP 8200 with an i5-2500. It has decently better single core performance than the J4105 (1706 vs 1092), but the next step down I have is a C2D E6400 which is decently lower at 824 ST.

Installed a Quadro K2200, which is basically a 4GB version of the GTX 750Ti. I ran Passmark GPU tests, and got 3777 G3Dmarks at 33W peak(via HWinfo), which is pretty inline with what you'd expect.
I then tossed it on a x1 riser card like you'd use for GPU mining, and it ran at PCIe 2.0 x1 (5GT/s). Ran the benchmarks again, and got 2008 G3Dmarks, with an peak power draw of 30.7W.

I don't have a ton of other low power cards to test, but that's probably a best case scenario since 4GB is a pretty large buffer in that performance class.

I adore jank so I definitely won't tell you to stop. If you're out shopping cards though, I wouldn't spend much there as running it from the Wifi m.2 is a real limitation. 1030 if you can get it for cheap is a little less powerful than a 750 Ti and quite efficient. 750 Ti if cheap is a Maxwell part with a better NVENC than Kepler if that matters to you. No H265 though which the 1030 would have (as would the GPU on the J4105).

 

[BFG10K]

M.2 has a max power limit of 10-15W. So unless you have a Voodoo 1 or an external power connector, forget about plugging a GPU into it.

 

[MrTeal]

M.2 has a max power limit of 10-15W. So unless you have a Voodoo 1 or an external power connector, forget about plugging a GPU into it.

Most of the adapters have an external power connector, similar to GPU mining risers.

https://www.amazon.com/ADT-Link-Extender-Adapter-Ribbon-Gen3-0/dp/B07YDF4Q34

The ones I've seen seem to use a 4 pin floppy connector though, which is kind of a PITA.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Where do you see that?

Sorry, evidently I was looking at the wrong paper. It turns out that it is pci 2 x4.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Sorry, evidently I was looking at the wrong paper. It turns out that it is pci 2 x4.

I wish there were a "cold" way to solder them. Does anyone make a cold soldering type of wet paste, or something like that? If they made something like JB Weld water putty, with extremely tiny metallic bits distributed throughout, it might work to just put dabs on the motherboard in the appropriate spots, then push a pci e slot onto the motherboard. I could clamp it in place while it set up. Has anyone ever done this?

 

[MrTeal]

8331D - Silver Conductive Epoxy Adhesive

An economical electrically conductive, silver-filled 2-part epoxy adhesive. It is smooth, non-sagging, thixotropic, and bonds well to a wide variety of substrates.

mgchemicals.com

That's even jankier though, and you're almost guaranteed to have a bad time with broken contacts and shorts. If you want to explore that route, best to find a kid with a soldering iron.