Re: Vidio card recommendation needed (was:Re: Can't start X after upgrade to Lenny)
On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 06:29:56 +1030
Arthur Marsh <arthur.marsh@internode.on.net> wrote:
> Marc Shapiro wrote, on 2009-01-25 04:50:
> > I posted this under the original thread, but since there were no
> > responses I figured that most readers had already determined that they
> > could not help with that problem and so did not read the post. Since
> > this is a totally different track to solving my problem I felt a new
> > subject was in order.
> >
> > Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > > I would probably be tempted to buy an nvidia or ati card and dump the
> > > sis driver.
> >
> > I don't think that I have actually purchased a video card separate from
> > the PC, or motherboard since my TRS-8- Model III died and I bought my
> > first PC compatible. That would have been about 26 years ago. Getting
> > a new board might not be that bad of an idea, but, as I have not
> > recently had to make such a purchase I have not looked into what is good,
> > bad, works with Linux, etc. I am not looking to spend a lot of money
> > and I don't need a fancy gamers board. I just need something that does
> > the job. I noticed that Fry's has several inexpensive EVGA boards,
> > specifically a 7200GS w/128MB or 256MB PCI-Express and an 8400GS w/512MB
> > for only $10.00 more. I don't mind the extra $10 for double to
> > quadruple the memory and a faster core, but is this a good board with
> > solid support? With rebates, these boards are going for $29.99 to
> > $39.99. Are there better boards that can be had for similar prices? Is
> > there a different line that I should look into? I don't want to start
> > any religious wars over what is the best graphics card. I just need a
> > solid card that works and doesn't have issues like the onboard Sis
> > chips seem to have.
> >
>
My personal experience is that intel, ati and nvidia one or two generations
back all work ok with the free drivers, none provide real 3d performance.
As far as I know ati drivers are open but problematic. Nvidia's are closed but
work pretty well.
intel cards are pretty mediocre (especially the x3100 that comes on a lot of
cheap laptops these days).
It's worth buying a standalone card as it uses it's own memory and not shared
memory. Personally I would go with nvidia and the proprietary drivers (if you
don't mind non-free).
> I know the feeling, since a family member has an HP machine with an
> on-board SiS graphics chip-set.
>
> As I had an AGP motherboard, I used a second hand ATI Radeon 9200 SE
> which works well with the Free "radeon" driver in package
> xserver-xorg-video-radeon.
>
> If considering an ATI graphics card you will probably want to find out
> what chip-set the cards you are looking at use.
>
> The "radeon" driver supports *some* ATI graphics cards using PCI
> Express, others are supported in the Free "radeonhd" driver in package
> xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd.
>
> If you have these packages installed, look at the manual pages for
> "radeon" and "radeonhd" and web pages:
>
> http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeon
> http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd
> http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
>
> to find what chip-sets and features are supported.
>
> Arthur.
>
>
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