Looking at video cards

[glitch003]

Hi,

I'm looking at buying a new top of the line video card. I've read a lot and my general impression is that NVidia tends to be very cool with linux drivers and such. I'm looking at the Geforce 6800 which should come out in a couple of days. I've looked at reviews and benchmarks and found that the Geforce 6800 and the new ATI X800 seem to be pretty equal. I currently have a Radeon 9500 which is nice, But I'm having trouble getting 3D accelleration working in gentoo.

Also, It seems that NVidia wil be releasing a PCI Express version of the Geforce 6800, And right now I only have a motherboard with agp 4x, So does anyone have any suggestions for PCI Express motherboards that are easily compatible with linux? I would like to stick with my current CPU, Which is a standard Socket A Athlon XP unit.

Any input is appreciated.

[aNoob]

nVidia support for Linux is better than ATI.

[pezplaya]

Go nvidia. I bought an ATI 9800Pro 256mb version about 2 months ago. I took serveral weeks trying to get the card to work with 3d acceleration, posted many times but nothing worked. I ended up returning it, buying an nvidia card and got it working in 2 minutes.

you can go check out my thread if u want:
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=128860&highlight=9800

nvidia has better linux support.

[bwkaz]

As far as PCI-X, people have been trying to get it into the market for something approaching three years now, and haven't ever had any luck. The problem always was that there weren't any motherboards that support it, because there weren't any devices that support it, because there weren't any motherboards that support it, ad nauseam. Classic chicken and egg problem.

Now that there are a few PCI-X video cards coming out, and there may be the odd PCI-X motherboard somewhere, they can feed off each other and start driving the price of each other down. But don't expect that to happen quickly -- if you can find a PCI-X motherboard at all, it's likely (at a guess anyway) to be a few hundred dollars more than a comparable PCI "classic"+AGP one.

I'm going to wait a year or two for PCI-X, myself, in other words. ;)

[JohnT]

Consider drivers before buying the latest card off-the-shelf, whatever the mfg, when considering compatibility.

[Bubba56]

Well... PCI Express is not exactly Main stream YET, but I know Dell is offering Intel based systems with PCI-X video cards, here is the url of a search of NewEgg (they rock) for PCI Express.

http://www.newegg.com/app/searchProductResult.asp?submit=advance

One problem you may have is finding a new motherboard that has PCI Express slot and a old Athlon socket A, I seriously doubt you will find such a beast. You may be able to salvage the Memory from the current MOBO, BUT any NEW board that supposrts PCI-X is going to be either Intel or a socket 939, 940 etc for AMD. I think I would hold off on buying PCI-X at this point, wait until the first revision comes out, by that time you may have the cash for a new CPU as well as the new interface video card.

Good luck and I hope this helps.

[habibbijan]

After struggling a lot, I finally got my ATI 9500 Pro working in Gentoo 2.6.6 without crashing every 10 minutes. It helped when I removed agpgart from the kernel and used AGP support from the radeon driver. Then I set: Option "UseInternalAGPGart" to "yes" in my XF86Config-4 file. Now I have fully-working 3D-acceleration that doesn't crash. I take it you've seen this?

http://odin.prohosting.com/wedge01/gentoo-radeon-faq.html

Some games, like Quake3, and Enemy-Territory look great, while others (America's Army) look like a powerpoint show. This is a slap in the face because my friend's Geforce 3 Ti200 plays AA smoothly in Fedora. Ouch!

My $.02 = Go Nvidia.