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 .

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

{"name":"606869","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/7\/77aebc34f84ed3cf0af224f2e6aff521.png","w":1345,"h":629,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/7\/77aebc34f84ed3cf0af224f2e6aff521"}

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.

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.

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.

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...

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