[GLLUG] New Video Card Advice

[Brian Hoort]

Greetin's,

I'm building a new box.  The old P200MMX just ain't cutting it 
anymore!  (Just for laughs, I paid $1450 for that computer, in parts, and 
built it myself, so that was a bargain!  Can't remember the year.  I think 
I've gotten my mileage out of it!)  Will be in-house GNU-Linux file server, 
now.

So I've got everything else ordered, but I must admit, I'm just totally out 
of the loop on video cards these days.  I'm needing a primer.  I've done a 
little searching, including the archive of this list, and didn't really 
find that much current info.  The best msg on the archive is copied at 
bottom of this message.

So far, system is:
Antec Quiet Media case (Overture)
ASUS A7V8X-X MB
Athlon 2400
1 Gb RAM
120 GB ATA Seagate 2MB cache(quiet)
etc.

I've put a lot of effort into making this thing quiet.  The last thing I 
want to do is put a video board with a jet-engine sounding fan on it into 
it.  Fanless would be better.  The MB supports AGP 8x, but it looks like 
Linux doesn't, currently?

I haven't had time to play a game in years.  So I don't need the latest 
gamer board.  That said, I'd like to find the time again, and don't want to 
put a board that can't handle any game in there.  As you can see, I'll 
probably keep this computer till I'm too old to fart without assistance so 
let's get something at least decent by todays standards in there.

I'm having trouble finding the current driver situation on drivers.  It 
looks like NVidia has good support for linux, you have to compile them, but 
they're proprietary?
ATI seems to be the other company, and they're more open to Linux, but 
according to the most recent info on our list, they don't work.

My priorities for video are thus:
1. Works Well in Linux, without weeks of troubleshooting and list help.  I 
just don't have time right now to be building the thing, let alone, 
fiddling to get it to work.
2. Quiet -- hopefully fanless
3. Cost - I am a cheap bastard.  I see on pricewatch boards start at $50 
and rapidly go up.  A $100 would be nice, and would probably get me a year 
old gamer card w/ 64 RAM?
4. Support a company with good Linux relations (openness)

Let's hear it!

PS.  Sorry for posting this hardware dribble.  I know it gets tiresome.

Thanks for the assistance, Brian

[begin snippet from GLLUG list]
Overall I've concluded the radeons aren't all they're cracked up to be -
they've given me fits on occasion even with That Other OS [tm} to say
nothing of Linux. I decided to buy them at the time because "they
supported Linux and the open source community" whereas nvidia was a
closed source binary driver. After getting my radeons, and judging from
comments from others on various lists, I've concluded that ati may
support open source in some way but when you get down to brass tacks
nvidia works... Whatever...

One thing you can try is to to disable DRI. Bill suggested that above.
Bill also mentioned that, at the time, I found that the driver wouldn't
support greater than 15 bit color. That was a couple of years ago though
(on Mandrake 8.2 initially and I did find that Mandrake 9.0 later
represented a small degree of improvement though still not very good) so
things might have changed significantly since then. YMMV. I was never
able to get a good frame rate with either the PCI or AGP radeon 7000 and
still have a stable platform. Basically, disable 3d and acceleration,
get the color density reduced enough, and you can get a useable degree
of stability. My experience was that you can't expect much more. As I
said, this was some time ago. You can always hope that the drivers have
improved since then. You can probably tell I'm not much of a fan of
radeon cards...


-- 
Mike Rambo
mrambo at lsd.k12.mi.us
[end snippet]

-- 
Brian Hoort