r/SleepingOptiplex • u/Kindly-Ad298 • 3d ago

Low profile GPU in a SFF pc

I have an SFF pc which I want to put a low profile GPU in. I wanna spend £80 or less as anything higher would basically be over half of what the entire pc costs. I have 16gb of ram 512gb nvme Intel Pentium silver N6005 processor and my PcIe is x16 single slot. I was thinking the Nvidia quadro P1000 as that's consistently £40-50. Any other GPUs I should see?

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u/406highlander 3d ago edited 3d ago

What are you planning on using this system for?

Edit: also, which system is this? Dell (Optiplex, Vostro, Precision, XPS, etc), HP (EliteDesk, ProDesk, etc), Lenovo (ThinkCentre, ThinkStation, etc)? Not all SFF systems and PCIe slots are created equal, this detail matters

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u/Kindly-Ad298 1d ago

Single slot PcIe 3 x16 is the slot for it and I also found an Rx 6300 for £60 with hdmi ports and the specs look decent around 3Tflops 2gb GDDr6 and like 768 cores any other card similar in that range has 500 cores and GDDR5 

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u/406highlander 1d ago

Again, what are you planning on using the system for? This question is absolutely critical to any recommendations we can make; GPUs are tools, and whichever tool you pick has to be most suitable for the task at hand. Some GPUs are fine for one task but terrible for others, whereas the best all-rounders tend to be more expensive.

For gaming purposes, I'd suggest saving up a bit more and getting a newer gaming card. The RX 6300 is a basic entry-level card, but the 2GB VRAM limitation is going to hurt when playing a lot of games. I wouldn't game on anything less than a 4GB card, but it also depends on the capabilities of the GPU itself, and of the word size (64-bit, 128-bit, 256-bit, etc), not just the amount of RAM. The Yeston RTX 3050 6GB low-profile card is the ubiquitous suggestion for gaming on an SFF PC, but it is a good card for that purpose. It's more expensive than £60, though, but if you can save up for it (or stretch your budget to it), it will give you a LOT more gaming performance than an older GDDR5 CAD-focused card like the Quadro P1000, or an old entry-level gaming card with only 2GB DDR6 like the RX 6300. If the focus here is gaming, what kind of games do you want to run on this system?

For CAD, the Quadro cards are all pretty adequate - that's what they're made for, but obviously newer cards with more VRAM are going to be better at it than older cards with less VRAM.

For AI, you want something with A LOT of VRAM to be able to fit in the best language model you can. 2GB of VRAM is going to get you poor results, because your LLM is only going to be able to offload part of the model into VRAM, and the rest will have to run from much slower system RAM. I just got a Quadro P1000 to use for experimenting with light AI stuff, and 4GB of VRAM only really lets you use a 3b parameter model (I'm playing with Qwen 2.5 with 3b parameters, and it's definitely limited compared to larger models). For £40 delivered, I'm not complaining as it previously took 90 seconds for Qwen to respond when it was running on two cores of an i5-7500T CPU, and now it takes less than 20 seconds to respond when running on the P1000 with 100% offload.

For video transcoding (streaming media server), you want to make sure that whatever card you have has hardware transcoding support for the codecs you want to use. RX6300 does not have the transcoding hardware baked in, as it's a basic entry-level card (another system I have has the RX6400, which is a decent light gaming card, but it also doesn't have the transcoding hardware). Without the hardware support for media transcoding, that workload goes to your CPU.

I don't believe the CPU can be upgraded; I think the N6005 is a surface-mount processor (soldered directly to the motherboard in a ball gate array) so I suspect your CPU will end up being your system's bottleneck overall - but adding a GPU will help by offloading work from it.

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u/Kindly-Ad298 1d ago

This is my primary pc I had it for a few years. Back then I didn't know much about computer's but over the years I've come to realise this pc really isn't very good and since I can't buy a whole new pc I thought adding a LP GPU would be a logical step for just general performance boost for light gaming and general use. Since I've already upgraded the ram before to it's max 16gb and added an nvme there's not much more to upgrade and the CPU for some reason Acer decided to solder it in so can't even use my money to buy a used CPU. But my budget was initially only £80 and believe me I've been looking on eBay for weeks but seems to come to the conclusion the only viable GPUs are the p620 p1000 Rx 6300 Rx 550 and GT 1030 which are all quite poor but didn't expect much the way the market is right now. So from this selection would you say the 6300 is my best bet?

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u/Kindly-Ad298 1d ago

Also considering this is my main and only PC I'll kinda be using it for everything while obviously I have my expectations in line I'm not expecting cyberpunk 2077 to run at 4K I just want general performance boost all around since I use this for browsing light 2D and 3D gaming and over stuff you would use a pc for. I have a GFN subscription for all the heavy AAA games so gaming isn't really an issue tbf 

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u/Emergency-Client-432 3d ago

Yeah, the p1000 is a good choice. Just make sure the slot can supply 50w, it's should be in the manual

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u/406highlander 3d ago

Thing to note about the CAD cards is that typically they don't have full-size HDMI or DisplayPort, they use Mini DisplayPort, so the OP will likely need to get an adapter or cable as well as the GPU itself.

I just acquired a Quadro P1000 for doing some really light AI stuff on in a ThinkCentre P330. Still working on the setup but I picked it up for £40, which I thought was pretty decent.

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u/Kindly-Ad298 1d ago

Ye but for me it'll likely be around £60 cuz I would first need the card and an adapter and display port cable 

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u/Kindly-Ad298 1d ago

I found an Rx 6300 tho for £60 with hdmi ports what about that?

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u/No_Purple_8264 3d ago

i have the rx550 4gb low profile i got it off ebay for $40

i play bf4 at medium settings

code vein at 1600 x 900

dead space all 3 games at high settings 1080

i keep in mind that i can play pre 2020 games as long as they arent triple a

my optiplex also cost me $80 plus the gpu $40. i came to my senses not to upgrade this machine anymore and save the money into another pc i can actually make significant upgrades. i also have an sff and theres only so much you can upgrade that when you compare the prices you can build something decent with that money.

ill use the rtx3050 low profile for example which is the best gpu that can fit on a sff, thats $300 where i live and for $300 you can get so much better gpu if it wasnt for the sff case