Video card upgrade.

[theharvester]

I am thinking about upgrading my video card and possible (down the road) my monitor. The monitor will be at least a 22 inch wide screen.
What have others had good luck with?

I don't do any gaming any more, mostly surf the web, edit photos and stack and edit CCD (digital) astronomy photos I take.
I do use Virtual Box and Windooz XP at times and it seems to slow things down quite a bit when it comes to screen refreshing.
Home built computer specs are:
Intel D946GZIS board
Intel P-4 2.8 GHz H.T. Processor (may upgrade to a core 2 duo)
4 GB Crucial DDr2
supports PCI Express x16
PCLOS 2009.2, KDE3

[Rudge]

I always have good luck with Nvidia cards. The trick to Nvidia cards is they have 4 numbers, the first one indicates the model and the second one indicates the capabilities.  i.e.  a 6800 is a better card than a 8200.  FYI

[Crow]

I always have good luck with Nvidia cards. The trick to Nvidia cards is they have 4 numbers, the first one indicates the model and the second one indicates the capabilities.  i.e.  a 6800 is a better card than a 8200.  FYI

How comes?  could you elaborate?

[Rudge]

I always have good luck with Nvidia cards. The trick to Nvidia cards is they have 4 numbers, the first one indicates the model and the second one indicates the capabilities.  i.e.  a 6800 is a better card than a 8200.  FYI

How comes?  could you elaborate?

Crow,
 
what are you asking? Why I have good luck, or why they name their cards that way?

I have good luck because there seems to always be a driver in the repos for my cards.

Why they name their cards that way I do not know. I just know that the second number in their cards indicates  how many features the card possess. The higher the number, the more advanced the card is. More ram, faster processors etc.     

[OldJimbo]

I've had good luck with NVidia chipsets on cards made by EVGA, Asus. 7300's and now 9600's.
The 9600 GSO I'm using now was incredibly discounted, and so for $50CAN I figure I got a good deal. I don't play games, but together with a 22" monitor, it plays HD well.
Others will be able to give more detail on cards but keep in mind to note the memory bandwidth and what type of memory is on the card. If a card is full length, will it block any SATA connections etc? Some fans are huge - and passive cooling can take up even more space. Power requirements can be heavy, too, even with cheaper cards.

[theharvester]

Thanks for the info, I will look into some cards and hopefully make an upgrade soon.

[theharvester]

OK now I need a little help.
I bought a PNY (nvidia 9400)  card and now I get dropped to a command line when booting. I tried both suggestions in this post.
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,61742.0.html

boot system with live CD
goto PC, System, File tools, File Manager - super user mode
copy your liveCD session /etc/x11/xorg.conf  file to >
HDD linux root partition ..../etc/x11/folder and overwrite the old xorg.conf
& reboot (remove CD)



#rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf           //First you remove the xorg.conf file in your system.
#XFdrake                              //Then you call XFdrake which will regenerate your xorg with correct settings
#reboot                                //Reboots your system


neither one worked for me and I still get dropped to the command line when booting up.
Any other suggestions to get my system back up and running. I also just upgraded to KDE4 if it makes any difference.

[Rudge]

Try booting into "safe" mode and run "video" and set the options there. You can test them out before saving.

[theharvester]

thank you rudge,
I did get it working by XFdrake, seems I forget things are case sensitive.

[OldJimbo]

Here's hoping that you enjoy your upgrade as much as I did mine!

[T6]

that video card could need(to get all the juice from it) the nvidia driver from repo, are you using it or just a vesa or a nv driver from xorg?

[theharvester]

T6, I guess it is using a generic driver. In Control Center it lists the driver as NVIDIA Not working with nv  Not sure exactly how to get the correct driver.

[theharvester]

Never mind, I did some digging around and got the Nvidia drivers installed and working. Got the 3D also working. The screenlooks much nicer with a good video card and connection. I will give it a workout when evrything is running good.

I had been looking into other issues I was having and trying to get them sorted out and fixed before working on the Video card.