I'm looking to upgrade the GPU in my media box, it's a Media PC case, so it needs to be something that isn't too long, and can't run hot either. But it has to be faster than a Radeon HD 3200. Preferably 2x or more.

Any suggestions?

append: Oh, it should also be able to handle 1080p without breaking a sweat. Video and Some gaming (not heavy stuff like crysis or anything).

How does this one look?
http://ncix.com/products/?sku=77699&vpn=R6670-MD2GD3&manufacture=MSI%2FMicroStar&promoid=1209

Doesn't require an external power adapter and uses very little power and runs cool:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4278/amds-radeon-hd-6670-radeon-hd-6570/15

Also it is a bit faster then a 8800. Wouldn't get it for a 100 bucks, but for about 50 it doesn't look too bad.

[edit]
So those benchmarks are for the GDDR5 equipped version of the card, the card on sale is the GDDR3 version. Probably explains why it is so cheap.

[edit #2]
What's you budget? That would make it easier to pick .

Hard Rock's suggestion of the HD 6670 is... um... a "little" more power than you wanted; It's a little over 3 times more powerful than the card you have right now... and quite a bit bigger.

If you don't mind going nVidia, a GeForce GT 610 is less expensive, leaves a smaller footprint, and is roughly twice as powerful as what you've got. (Technically, the pixel rate isn't twice as high but the texel rate is 3 times higher.)

One of these: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2827132&CatId=3669

EDIT: Oh yeah. In terms of 1920x1080 support, virtually every card on the market can handle that nowadays. The key thing that will hold back 1080p graphics is how fast your system itself can push data to the card, so if you're having trouble running 1080p videos as it stands, then upgrading the graphics card probably isn't going to help much.

I'm not actually having problems with most 1080p video. Sometimes a h264 1080p video will have some issues. The issue is GL performance, especially with minecraft.

The problem is actually with it being able to handle GL at 1080p with better than 15fps (I'd prefer 30-60+) in games.

Basically I absolutely need more power, but have thermal issues. Its a balancing act.

I don't want to spend a whole bunch. I think my requirements preclude anything super expensive. I absolutely can't install a long card. It won't install It looks like I have a max of about 8 inches depth in the case, my old 8800GTS 320M card won't likely fit. But it also generates too much heat at full blow.

Do you have enough room to install a double-height card that vents to the outside of the system? Then you could go for something more powerful without worrying about heat issues.

Of course, the drawback is that most double-height cards are also longer than the PCIe slot's reach.

The trouble with going with budget cards though is that they're not really that much more powerful than the budget cards of the previous generation, or even the generation before that... or even the generation before that. There's been little innovation in graphics technology for years now. I'm using a GeForce 9800 GT, a freakin' 4-year-old chipset, and can run pretty much anything with a decent framerate, provided my CPU can handle it.

Figuring out the best card to buy can be a bit tricky. I like to browse selections then compare the raw stats thanks to the massive comparison tables on Wikipedia. Pixel Fill rates, Texture Fill rates, Memory Bandwidth and GFLOPS are the most important numbers, the first one affecting pixel shading, the second affecting scene complexity, the third affecting overall performance and the fourth also affecting all shader components, vertex, pixel and geometry.

However, having finally gotten some time in with the AMD Catalyst drivers on a friend's system, I have to say I much prefer nVidia's configuration system.

Those slot fans really don't help very much heat wise. But yes, I should have room (width anyhow) for a double slot card.

I don't care about pure performance for this machine. I just want to play some simple games (ie: minecraft), and run flash decently on my media box (its connected to a 55" LCD, why wouldn't I try to play some games on it? ).

I'm leaning towards NVidia at the moment, for no other reason than that I had some serious issues with the fglrx driver and this HD 3200. First its not supported by the latest drivers, second, theres some serious graphical corruption if xbmc is started first (I have no idea why that is even possible), and the tearing in video playback is rather noticeable (I didn't try very hard to fix it, last time I tried it wasn't even possible, so I had been running with the radeon drivers for the past year or two).

I don't really like nvidia much either though. Had some stupid issues with my 8800GTS, and them claiming they needed some special API added to the linux kernel to be able to support XRandR 1.2 (or above) only for them to add support for it years later without that API being added (it seemed to happen shortly after Windows introduced their new WDDM stuff that deals with mulitmon better). Go figure.

I can't remember who linked first to this, but I'm really grateful
You might be able to get a GT 530 at about the same price as a GT 610.
I think all ATI cards with good bang per buck sell out. Especially because of Bitcoin mining Hunting for old nVidia cards might pay off.

Eh, the newer ATI cards suck at bitcoin mining, at least compared to the older Radeon HD 5xxx models. They were by far the best bang for the buck.

Hm, No 530 in the selection I'm going to choose from. Skip the "popular" sections at the top, the real list of cards is below. The 6670 there is really cheap.

That listing is the most confusing I've ever seen
I am by no definition knowledgeable, but this one looks pretty cheap good
http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=75405&vpn=ZT%2D40603%2D10H&manufacture=Zotac
I'd go for that personally. Even though I have never heard of Zotac. Also "GTS 430" is not an nVidia model, just like "GT 210" isn't
Dunno if ATI has video codec under Linux. That 6670 looks good, if not a bit hot.

Well it is a search listing. You can go into the video card section and filter by brand and type of card as well. You'd get a better listing that way.

There was one on there for like $45 or something stupid. Or less.

heh. Well, I don't know if a 220 is enough minecrap was actually kinda not fast on my old 8800GTS 320. It was playable, much more so than my laptop, but still.

I have a low profile^[1] NVIDIA EN8400GS which is hella-slow. It just barely did 2D desktop stuff decently

Newer cards seem to be supported via the VA-API->XVBA stuff. But in general it seems VDPAU is better supported over all still. Not sure if I'll use the video acceleration to be honest. It depends if it actually performs better than software decoding and rendering (sometimes its worse ).

The machine is a Phenom 9550 quadcore with 2GB ram (I have some extra ram I could probably put in there, just haven't bothered, it hasn't been needed at all).

The GT 220 is faster than the HD in your system now, but Toms Hardware does have it slower than 8800GTS, so Minecraft might not be worth it.

Looking at that chart, no wonder it's hard to upgrade video cards at times.

Well, the 8800 GTS 320 was capable, I think. I don't remember exactly how well it did though. I don't really feel like swapping my cards out again though.

I'd say I should get the best card possible given the size and heat budgets I have set.

GT 430 should be around 50% slower than the 8800GTS^[1].

Your CPU is quite weak, though. When it comes to gaming, it generally gets worse results than my 2 core CPU, and I just get 20-30 fps in minecraft with the lastest version (no matter the resolution, I get the same in a tiny window or maximized to 1920x1080, the CPU is the real bottleneck for me ).

It is possible I'm getting some cpu issues with it. But I'm betting the integrated gpu's gl performance still isn't enough. I'll have to see about upgrading the cpu afterwards. Maybe.

The 6670 should be powerful enough for sure. I'm happy with my (budget) 6450. It was about $40, plays Quake 4 and runs all of my own games just fine. I've watched blurays on it, should be fine. I dunno, depends if you're REALLY on a budget. I might go for a 6670 instead if I had the extra $30 and didn't want a low end GPU.

The 5450 is what I first tried (I had a 4850 but it's not supported on Windows 8.) That thing was SLOW big time. The 6450 seems about the same as the 4850, and the 4850 was upper-mid-end at one time.

It's quite a shitty game to benchmark with anyways. Its use of GPU/CPU baffles me most of the time.

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That is running on an i5 2500k @ 4.5 GHZ, and it uses 30% CPU. That's one entire core at work clocked at that speed.

Thomas, if you're getting your new GPU for Linux, I heard Nvidia is doing a lot of work in the drivers with the incoming Steam release(increasing performance quite a lot as well), so it might be better you go for an Nvidia card instead.

I am leaning in that direction. Though Valve is apparently working with AMD as well (and intel for that matter).

Append:

To reply to an earlier remark about the cpu not being enough, it seems like the Phenom I 9550 isn't too far off of my Phenom II 810^[1], which I have in my desktop, it with my radeon 6850 does pretty good. So while the machine could probably benifit from a faster cpu, I don't think its something I need to do right now. Though I've been looking at some of the 65w AM3 chips and its tempting.

In any case this is the list of cpus my media box supports. Most of which just aren't sold retail anymore probably have to go ebay for things like the 910e which is pretty slick.

Minecraft is CPU and RAM intensive and VERY poorly optimized. Despite having 2 GB of RAM on a Windows XP system and a dual-core, 2.0 GHz CPU, if I don't install the Optifine mod my framerate randomly fluctuates between 20 FPS and 2 FPS at all times. With Optifine, 60 FPS all the way so long as it's not loading world chunks. (Optifine also lets me vSync, which Minecraft can't seem to do properly on its own, despite having an option for it now.)

That said, it does use quite a bit of GPU power too.

The only drawback to going with older graphics cards over newer cards is less support for features introduced in DirectX 10/11 and OpenGL 3.0+, as well as lower GFLOPS measurements, meaning that shader-intensive games will suffer lower framerates. That said, my 9800 GT runs pretty well with most of what's out there. I have some graphical anomalies with the shadows in Skyrim but other than that, no real issues with it.

The plus to going with older cards though is that you can sometimes get more raw pixel/texel power for cheaper, so games that aren't shader-intensive will run much more smoothly.

In fact, my CPU is the main bottleneck now. As much as I want to upgrade it, it's already almost as high-end as my motherboard will support, meaning if I want anything better I need a new motherboard... might as well just save up for a brand new system.

So I've been looking at cards, it's been suggested I go with this one. It's an NVIDIA GT 640 1G. Seems like a decent little card. It'll fit, runs at 64W or something ridiculous, and is about $75 after instant rebate (of $25!). It's also about 2x as fast (almost) as the 8800GTS, and 8x (fill rate anyhow) as fast as the Radeon 3200 I've got right now.

The 640 GT comes in several variations. The one you're looking at is the 3rd most capable of those variations. That said, it has very good pixel and texel rates for the price, plus it's a modern card and supports DX11.1 and OpenGL 4.3. (Though the listing in that link says "4.2" for some odd reason...)

But yes, it's a good amount of power for the price so that looks like the card you want.

As for how capable it will be performance-wise, it's on par with the 9800 GT I'm using. A little more powerful, though not by much. That would make it a mid-range card and suitable for running modern games on mid-detail settings or slightly older games on max-detail settings.

My only concern now is trying to find one of those older AMD Phenom II "E" processors, most places don't have any. Even ebay is short on them. Which sucks balls. If the cpu ends up being a problem I may just replace the mobo and cpu. Feh.

append:

For $10 more, I could go with this one. It's just got twice the memory. Not sure how much better that makes it fill/texel rate wise though.

append2: the memory is also 500Mhz faster. I wonder if that's worth the $10 extra bucks.

append3: went with the 2GB variant. Thanks peeps.

(it's rare I give credit to everyone that posted in a thread )

That card you just linked to is actually the 900 MHz variant, which is the 2nd-best variant of the GT 640 and is 10% better than the other one in terms of capabilities. Having twice the RAM will basically allow you to run maximum texture resolution in certain games that support extremely high texture resolutions like Quake 4.

For the most part though, 1 GB is plenty. Even Skyrim will play fine with 1 GB of video RAM at its highest texture resolution settings. I guess what it comes down to is if you really want that extra 10% power over the other GT 640.

EDIT: Oh wait, you already went with the 2 GB card...

Both cards seem to be the same except the size and clock speed of the memory.

I can't say 2GB isn't a bit overkill considering the machine its going into currently only has 2GB installed. But hey, it was only $10 more, and should help with performance.

Too many edits?

You should look into mounting part of your graphics memory as a temp drive I saw once this tutorial

I can has news! The new card is fucking awesome. And CPU wise, I'm doing good. At the same settings I had the Radeon HD 3200 at (lowest possible with vanilla minecraft 1.3.2) I get over 200FPS, maybe a lot more. At the highest settings, I get upwards of 125 (most of the time, sometimes it dips to 54fps if I look in certain directions, minecraft is weird). FYI, the Radeon got 8-32fps ish on lowest settings.

I think the only thing I don't like about this, is I can't play minecraft and watch videos on the tv at the same time at least not fullscreen

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Why would you do that? Do you want mediocre results?

[EDIT]

The card you're speaking so highly of is the NVIDIA GT 640 1G?

I like to watch tv in the background, say like minecraft videos but Id normally do that on the TV. Now the TV is the MC box. soooo. Yeah. If I have to do some video watching, I'll just do that on the laptop I suppose.

I splurged ($10 whole extra!) and got the 2G variant.

I meant you'll get whomped by the night crawlers in minecraft if you're dividing your attention.

I tend not to be anywhere dangerous when watching stuff. The video is usually something on how to build or do something in minecraft.

I know you don't really need it with your new card, but if you get yourself the Optifine mod for Minecraft you'll probably smooth out those strange FPS hiccups from looking in specific directions.

I on the other hand can't live without Optifine or my framerate is too erratic to be playable, as I already mentioned earlier.

...it also has much better vSync support, which can help make everything even smoother.

It also causes really strange rendering glitches. You should see what Optifine does to minecraft on my laptop.. Man its a mess.

Optifine comes in three different flavours: Standard, Smooth and Multi-Core, though nowadays they combine all three into a single package and you can choose which mode to put it into from the in-game options. (Though it's best not to change this setting if you have a map loaded, only from the title screen.)

On my system, the Smooth mode works best. The Standard mode stutters a bit and the Multi-Core mode glitches like crazy. The best mode to use depends on a lot of factors, though I think the Smooth mode is universally the most effective.

All I know, is that on my laptop, character, mob, and some item/block textures massively glitch out. Sometimes they are just outright gone (or part of them is, like the top of a chest) or the texture looks like its been replaced by part of a much larger portion of the texture atlas, so it kind of looks like a bunch of item/block textures are squished together onto a single surface.

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Oh... looks like a mod conflict. Optifine is unfortunately not compatible with all of them.

Or... or or or... Optifine has special texturing modes, some of which I think may be enabled by default (not sure) which adjust the way certain textures are drawn to make them more dynamic, an example of which: Making glass blend in with itself to make solid glass sheets instead of panels. Those enhancements could be the source of your woes in trying to use it if some of your mods are also trying to adjust the way textures work.

First image is pure vanilla (well except optifine and rei's minimap). And it glitches out players, mobs, and blocks like mad.

And it doesn't seem to glitch mod objects...

In that case, the problem is probably... umm... hmm...

...OK, I'm out of ideas.

My best guess is combination of GM45/4500MHD intel drivers and whatever optifine is trying to do.