I have a HP Compact 4300 sff and the only affordable low profile card I can get is a passively cooled Asus GT1030. Is there any way to get drivers working. I know that only icafe drivers are compatible with 1060
icafe drivers are not compatible with any nvPascal series GPU - that means none of the GTX 10x0 cards work with drivers in XP. You can edit 368.81 (XP-last) driver's nv_dispi.inf and add nvPascal entries (I tried that with my GTX 1070) - while 2D works though sometimes sluggishly, D3D and OGL acceleration doesn't. OpenGL could possible work as it appears it's only a software limitation, but D3D surely not, it's just not implemented.
You need NVIDIA GTX 980 or AMD R9 280x. They are latest most powerfull and supported ones under XP / 2003.
Or, in other words, a GeForce 900 series or a Radeon Rx 200 series. GTX 750 and GTX 750 TI also fall under the 900 series criteria as they are the same exact architecture. The other 700 series gpus are from the older architecture.
Yeah but my PC is a sff HP compact also most people selling those kind of cards in my country sell them higher than original price! I managed to find a GT 1030 for 40euros after so long which again isnt that good of a deal
What about Geforce GTX 960? It's about as fast as 1030 if not faster, compact and should also not be more expensive.
Just be careful with Radeon 200 series. 290 seems to be different architecture and not compatible. I have not tested it myself, I own 280x and 2 different GTX 980, 960 and one 730 for testing
Fury GPUs are even newer - GCN 3.0. If proper support really caps out at GCN 1.0 GPUs, then anything newer than the Rx 200(x) series is out of the question(assuming full functionality is expected). Also, XP only supports up to DirectX 9.0c(unless some ungodly modification makes later DirectX versions possible). Kind of a crappy part about this is that Radeon cards from that era are generally hotter than the GeForce equivalents and more often than not, if you come across a used Radeon GPU, it will be an almost dead or outright dead GPU(best case unstable). That and the fact that most people don't really take care of their graphics cards(cleaning, repasting) because someone told them it's not necessary, it's hard to get a good used Radeon card. Might be better off sticking to nvidias.
That's why we have Kepler and Maxwell BIOS editor. With a little ingenuity one can easily adapt any GTX 6xx, 7xx or 9xx series card to lower TDP without significant performance loss.
Even with lower TDP the VRMs will still pop on most high-end 900 Series cards. Ask buildzoid and he'll tell you "Maxwell has dogs**t VRMs on any card short of a 980 Ti Kingpin or HoF"