Hello ereryone,

I am currently running a PIII500 with 640MB ram and an 8mb ATI Rage Pro AGP 1X/2X graphics card with Slack 10.1 . I would like to upgrade this for something a bit better (32meg or 64meg) be it agp or pci. Only really want something powerful enough to fun fullscreen videos and DVD's possibly if my specs allow. Any Reccomendations would be greatly recieved.

Many thanks

David

i wonder if you still can get a Nvidia MX440 or not, i guesss no one building it anymore. Bottomline is Nvidia card.

Agreed, I've been using a Radeon 9800 Pro since my geforce 4200 gave up.

Sure it works, but especially if you like running the latest kernels, you can expect to waste hours of time on it.

How I miss the nvidia installer

(go for a gf 4 MX or GF 5200, if you won't be playing anything more recent than the original unreal tournament at high resolutions)

I vote on Nvidia as well

Always nvidia. I didn't buy a laptop till I could get one with a decent nvidia card. I vowed once before I would *never* buy another anything with an ATI card in it. I bought a radeon 8500 and from them on said never again. And I've never been disappointed by them. Their response to the driver breaking in different kernel releases(doesn't happen often) is pretty amazing. Thousands of times faster then ATI.

I waited 1 and 1/2 years for some decent support for my 8500, then I gave up and bought a dirt cheap ti4200. never looked back. You certainly will never regret buying an Nvidia card.

check out the HCL-
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php?cat=120

titanium_geek

Thanks for the quick responses.

It seems that all the decent cards are 8X or 4X agp, is it backwards compatable? Will it work in a 1X/2X slot or should i just go for a PCI card. I take it my old motherboard any old processor wont have any problems if i stick a brand spanking new PCI card in one of the slots?

Many Thanks

David

I don't know whether the compatibility is there, but if you want to upgrade to a 64 bit system sometime later, PCI would be better since the 64 bit motherboards use PCI Express, not AGP.

I don't think a PCI Express card works in an old PCI slot

(and regular PCI graphics cards... suck :P)

The point (in my head) is to not buy another card down the road when he might switch to PCI Express.

There are plenty of AMD 64-bit motherboards with AGP available... for now at least.

really, it doesn't look like he needs any AGP or PCI Express and could easily do with the cheapest card he could find with X support and the right resolution, since he is not doing 3D.

A p3 500 doesn't have the power to push a much faster video card. An used tnt2 or gf2 mx200 or 400 would fit the bill nice with a 500mhz P3.

As for Ati video cards, I have Slackware 10.1 installed on 3 system including a laptop, the 2 desktop are equipped with Radeon 8500le and score over 2400 in glxgears with the latest ati video drivers. My laptop is an Ibm Thinkpad ti42p with 1gB of memory and an ATI firegl T2 with it's own 128mB of memory and is twice as fast as the 8500le. So, I agree that ATI needs improvement, but it is already starting to show. They have made a lot of progress in the past year or so.

Note that one of the desktops is still running with 2.4.29 kernel but the 2 other computers are running with 2.6.11

i'll be a bit more specific, all i want is a card so i can watch some videos i downloaded
in mplayer using -fs -zoom and not have to worry about the -framedrop option. At the monent using all those options the videos are very choppy. Would a new card help this or is my system just too slow?

I'm not real sure that your proc is fast enough or not. Does your ATI do hardware accel?
what are your FPS when running glxgears?

I do have a success story for you if you want to read about my recent upgrade.


I'll begin with a warning: YMMV ( your milage may vary!)
TMNWFY ( This MAY NOT work for you)

But,
I have had GREAT success with the MAD DOG series of vid cards.

If you have a CompUSA near you (they seem to have a good selection, drop in and check out their card selections, most every week they run a special on vid cards, so something out there (with a nVidia GPU) should be a pretty good value for you to try.

I upgraded my card ( ATI 7200 64MB-AGP2x) with a Mad Dog Conquerer FX 5200 plus (128Mb AGP 8x ). I took a chance on it working with my old system, (Abit BP6 - dual proc celery board)
which was supposed to be a AGP 1/2x board. It worked flawlessly for me, and is now running in my ASUS K8V-SE ( AMD 64 - AGP 8x) motherboard.

Again, I'm NOT saying that this will work for you, but I am saying that IT WORKED for me.
A quick glance at http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...4851&Ne=400000
will show you the entire line of cards available and pricing, sometimes they have a $20 to $30 rebate running that really makes the upgrade affordable.


Hope this helps,