Review on ZOTAC GeForce GT 710 1GB DDR3 PCIE x1 Graphics Card - DVI, HDMI, VGA, Low Profile (ZT-71304-20L) by Wayne Drakh

I upgraded my Ivy Bridge Celeron G APU GPU with this card. I don't play games so it didn't matter, but I watched a lot of videos and noticed a lot of frame drops on 1080p footage with the onboard graphics. This particular PC is running Ubuntu 14.04 displayed on a new Samsung LCD TV via HDMI. This Zotac card fits in a single PCIe x16 slot, even with a passive heatsink. The installation process was easy and less complicated than I thought since my default BIOS uses any PCIe card as the primary display. I had to download and install proprietary nVidia GPU drivers, but it literally took 2 clicks after opening the Additional Drivers program. Wall. Everything looks fine now. The graphics aren't perfect as I see tearing and some stuttering in VLC, but none of this shows up when playing the same content in Kodi. I did see a few frame drops on Two Towers 1080p, but they were minor compared to the frame drops with integrated video. Additional surprise: nVidia drivers added a bunch of new GPU data to my pSensors screen, I didn't even have to do anything, they just popped up. This allows me to monitor GPU temperature, activity, bus usage, etc. Despite being installed next to another card, the GPU temperature always drops after the video is stopped and it never overheats even during a 90-1 minute 1080p movie. Passive cooling is sufficient for my use. One flaw: with the default nVidia driver settings, dark scenes were almost impossible to view. The screen was mostly blank as there was no clear black display between this card and my LCD. This was fixed by limiting the RGB color range in the nvidia settings program, now dark scenes look fine.