[Tyrian]

I'm building a set of machines for a guy who runs a DJ business.  I need to pick a GPU that has VGA, DVI, and HDMI output.  It needs to be fairly short, as the case is not very deep.  It also needs to have a fairly low power draw.  I've looked a bit at nVidia cards in the GT200 and GTS250 series.  All he needs to do is play video, some of it HD, probably 1080.  What card would be best suited for it?

Also, I'm looking at potentially skipping the GPU altogether and using a i5-650 with the H55 chipset to take advantage of the onboard graphics processing.  How effective is it at playing back HD video?  I haven't been able to find a definitive answer.

These systems will also be playing music in conjunction with the video.

EDIT:  Also, if I decide to go the GPU route, should I go for 512MB or 1GB, or is it negligible?

[Liberator]

Well pretty much anything in the 200 series or later would probably do the job.

That said, the actual processing power needed will be related to the size of the display.  The video may be 1080p, but if it's on a screen twice that number of lines tall you'll need more power to handle the scaling, this is all still within even the most basic of the 200s based on my quick research.

Also, pretty much any card you look at is going to have DVI exclusively, particularly in the size(physical) range that we are talking about.  A simple adapter is all that is needed to convert to either one, but you'll need multiple cards(not necessarily SLI/Crossfire) to handle all 3 at once.

So we come back to the physical dimensions of the card as the defining characteristic.

And the Geforce GTS 240 seems to fit the bill the best, it's the most power in the smallish sized package you are likely to find.  If you need something low profile, the 210 would probably be an acceptable alternative, tho you would probably have to order special backplates separately.

[Klaustrophobia]

Also, pretty much any card you look at is going to have DVI exclusively, particularly in the size(physical) range that we are talking about.  A simple adapter is all that is needed to convert to either one, but you'll need multiple cards(not necessarily SLI/Crossfire) to handle all 3 at once.

not necessarily.  the ati 5k series has support for 3 monitors from a single card, though i'm not entirely sure how they accomplish the output.  i also don't know if the entire series is capable, or just the higher ones. 

[Ghostavo]

Every card in ATI's 5000 series has Eyefinity support. The limitation seems to be how many output sockets the card has. The tech demo demonstrating Eyefinity used six displays and a single card, but I have no idea how they accomplished this without a custom made six socket card.

[Klaustrophobia]

they must have splitters of some sort, 6 display ports would take up 3 expansion slots.