I am currently using the onboard graphics on my GIGABYTE H370 HD3 motherboard however an application I use for working on large image files needs a dedicated graphics card so I was wondering if anyone has recommendations for a passively cooled Graphics Card. I don't play games and ideally don't want to spend too much money on it. Thanks in advance
That's not true. You can get passively cooled 1030s, 730s and 710s, or on the AMD side R5 230s, for example. Does the OP even need something as beefy as a 1050ti / 1060?
I just fitted an old passively cooled EVGA 710 to my PC to drive a second monitor to use for CCTV duties, it is working perfectly well, almost as good as my primary card.....
The GDDR5 version of the GT 1030 is actually surprisingly capable of gaming at 1080p, albeit with reduced settings on the most demanding titles. I used a passive one for a bit in a low profile PC and was most impressed by it.
Depending of the price/performance point you are aiming for, I think these days (if you have the option) a semi-passive (aka semi-fanless, 0db card) will often make more sense than a fully passive one. Even powerful GPUs these days sip power at idle, which is what they are generally doing unless you are gaming or running a GPU accelerated programme. So when you generally want it to be a semi-passive card will be silent, but when you need it you have all the inherent advantages of active cooling.
dedicated graphics "that don't count" can still be quite useful for systems that require more GPU grunt than the on chip solution and or their own dedicated ram, I run a passive R5 230 card in my garage computer and it does cad work and only gets grumpy at the peak of summer ... in the mid south USA where 40+ c is not uncommon in the garage running 1080p live streams from comcast the bad thing is, I bought that card from a local big box for 35$ 4 years ago, and that exact same card from the exact same store is 2x the price, which boggles the mind ... so you might want to get some used OEM old gen card from the usual sites and deal with older drivers
'Better graphics' is rather vague. What application are you trying to run? If it;s something that needs a specific brand of card to accelerate (e.g. CUDA only) that would help dictate what cards would be useful. Likewise if its a memory limitation then knowing how much memory is needed is also important, no point in buying a whole new card if it's just going to be memory limited too.
Why does it need to be passively cooled? I got a passively cooled graphics card for the other PC and found that I had to point a case fan at it as it would overheat pretty quickly. Granted, not all passive coolers are created equal, but I'd echo what wolfticket says and look at cards that run silently but are equipped with active cooling.