I have been having problems with Linux and my ATI Radeon 9550 card and am thinking about just getting rid of it and buying one of these:

Club 3D nVidia GeForce FX 5200 256MB DDR TV-OUT/DVI (AGP)

Does anyone have any thoughts or expereince with this or other nVidia cards.

Many thanks.

i have an nvidia 7800 GT on PCI-E Nvidia drivers couldn't be easier to install (providing you have the kernel sources installed for anything bar a stock kernel).

Just download, run the script, even updates my Xorg.conf for me.

And yeah, i had a Radeon 9700, hence now it's an nvidia

Thanks ethics,

does it make a difference if it is PCI-E or AGP? I presume not.

It seems that you would recommmend nVidia, it would be interesting to hear what others think.

I would go with a Nvidia as well the driver is easier to install and I didn't think that you could get a pci-e model but a quick Google search reveals a 5300 model number which is a 5200 as a pci-e card.

thanks for your reply HappyTux, but I am a little confused;

pci-e or AGP ?

the one I have seen is AGP but does it make a difference?

my mobo is the MSI K8N-Neo which is not pci-e.

Well then you do not want a pci-e then you need AGP, you had mentioned both in the post I replied too ....

To try to clarify things, Yes, it does make a difference, and you want to be sure you buy a card that is compatible with your mobo. Specifically, if your mobo has an AGP video card slot, then you want to buy the AGP version of the card; if the mobo has a PCIe vide card slot, then you want to buy the PCIe version of the card. (If it has both, you could buy either, but in that case I'd suggest going with PCIe since it's the newer standard.) Since you indicate that your mobo is "not PCIe", then you want to confirm that it does in fact use AGP - if the mobo is pretty old, it might actually still be using the old PCI adaptor.

The basic issue here is that you don't want to spend money on a new video card, only to discover that it's got a different number of pins than the mobo's connector slot has, and thus cannot be installed. Good luck with it

Thanks JW,

I know that I my mobo does not have pci-e therefore it must be AGP.

It is only about a year or so old so it is realtivly new.

You are right that I do not want to spend mony on a new card only to find that I have the same or similar problems.

The ATI Radeon cards seem to cause linux users several problems, with a lot of people saying they will never buy an ATI card again.

I just want to knwo how well nVidia support the linux community.

I bought a PNY Geforce 5200 about 1 1/2 years ago, which although was well supported in linux it turned out to be a cheap piece of crap which overheated and locked up constantly.

When the fan seized up for the 2nd time in a month or so (I was lubricating it in between) I finally bought a BFG 6200 (which is actually a rebranded Chaintech) which has turned out much better.

Definitely spend a little more for a quality card. I have no experience with Club 3D, so as long as you're satisfied that they're a reputable company you should be ok.

Having purchased and used both nVidia and ATI cards in the past, I can confidently recommend nVidia. Installing the drivers is literally a simple, one or two minute task (basically all you need to do is download the package from nVidia, then run a single shell command) while my experience wrestling with ATI's drivers wasted huge numbers of hours over multiple days, with only partial success, and the process itself required running many commands, modifying multiple config files, recompiling the kernel, and so on. In fairness, my experience was based on how things existed about 2 years ago, and I certainly recognize that perhaps part of the difficulty I encountered was due to errors on my part, but after a certain point I got so frustrated that I decided "Never again", and removed that card from my machine. Since then, I have purchased nVidia cards exclusively (from Chaintech if it matters) and they are awesome.

Again, in fairness, my understanding is that ATI has been working to improve their Linux driver installation process and that it now is much easier than before, but I'll have to take other people's word for it. Personally, I'm not sure I'd be willing to spend my time or money trying to test that theory. Strictly my own opinion of course, nothing more.