[GLLUG] New Video Card Advice

Alex Nelson anelson at ansoftcomputing.com
Thu Oct 30 16:32:11 EST 2003


On Thu, 2003-10-30 at 09:32, Brian Hoort wrote:
> 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]

I play games under Linux quite a bit. I have a NVidia GeForce2 MX 400
card and it runs America's Army Operations fullscreen at 1280x1024 at
43-72 frames a second with no problems. I also run FlightGear and that
runs great as well. My vote is NVidia all the way.

-- 
Alex Nelson <anelson at ansoftcomputing.com>
ANSoft Computing



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