Mizzou_Engineer

[Log in to get rid of this advertisement]

I purchased this card to drive a pair of 20.1" 1600x1200 LCD monitors for my desktop. I have previously had a little NVIDIA 6200TC card to drive one of the monitors, but since I wanted a dual-head setup with matched monitors, I needed a card with two DVI ports on it. ATi's hardware is very powerful and generally a better bang-for-the-buck than NVIDIA's, but NVIDIA's cards are known for their good Linux drivers. The x1900GT was on a very steep rebate ($250 was the original price, I paid $75) so I decided to take a chance and get this card.

The card itself is a very nice unit, although it's quite long and just barely fits in an ATX case. It's got a little fan on it and a large, heavy heatsink. The fan is silent at idle but it's pretty loud when it turns 100% on for a second at boot.

Driver installation was no harder for me than it was with my old NVIDIA card. I used the current ATi Catalyst drivers (8.29.6) and they installed and configured with a minimal of tweaking. Note that you will want to kill your old xorg.conf and use /opt/ati/bin/aticonfig -f --initial=dual-head to make a new xorg.conf that the ATi drivers can use for their configuration. If you just have a single-head display, using the standard /opt/ati/bin/aticonfig --initial=/etc/X11/xorg.conf will work just fine. Also, you'll want to un-comment the "dri" section in your xorg.conf to harness hardware rendering, which is extremely powerful on this card. Once the setup was done, I was presented with a spanned 3200x1200 desktop with an absolutely stunning image quality.

I'd highly recommend a new ATi card (x1000 series) which is hard to say after how cruddy their earlier fglrx drivers are and that unlike the older R200 cards, you have to use the ATi drivers. The new drivers work and work well, and you'll not be disappointed.