What's a good, silent graphics card for Linux?

Sigbjørn Lund Olsen · Post by **Sigbjørn Lund Olsen** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 4:11 pm

...it's most assuredly not Matrox P650, whose support for Linux is utter and total shite. Which is a shame, cos it's passively cooled and it has ultra-crisp images + dual screen support. Which is what I need, but for Linux.

A quick look around suggests that nVidia is (vastly) superior on Linux to ATI. Now, I need an AGP card that has support for two monitors (VGA - I have some DVI-VGA adapters with my P650, but I don't know if these can be used on any DVI port? (presumably they can)) or a monitor and a TV.

It obviously needs to be passively cooled, or possible to cool passively.

(And not too expensive, I wasn't planning on this - after all I was under the impression that Matrox had Linux drivers that worked when I bought the card)

Any suggestions?

Sigbjørn Lund Olsen · Post by **Sigbjørn Lund Olsen** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 5:10 pm

Looking at these:

http://www.gainward.de/new/products/pro ... rison.html

What's the effect of having 256mb ram as opposed to 128mb ram?

silencery · Post by **silencery** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 5:16 pm

yeah, traditionally, nvidia support is much better than most other manufacturers. Problem w/ dual monitors on one card (i'm assuming you wanna run a single card) is that nvidia didn't start having decent support for that until the heavier (hotter) cards came out. I suppose something like this http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx ... ia=AA25640 might suit you...

ATI used to make a super cheap dual-head card before the radeon days, but I can't recall the name of it right now... That card had decent support for linux.

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 10:42 pm

the RAM will have no effect at that level, unless you're somehow driving enough pixels at enough bpp to use all of it.

3d games/apps use it for storing textures, and triple buffering and antialiasing and such all use modest amounts of extra RAM i think. given that it's still just a 5200 i can't think of any reason for going with 256mb over 128, should still be massive overkill for ordinary work/media etc anyways.

dukla2000 · Post by **dukla2000** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 10:54 pm

I'm an 'ATI-boy': have a 9200SE currently and a 9000SE previously, both of which are passive, both of which have both DVI and VGA out. Pretty sure they are available with TV-out options as well. Both cards still running fine under 2.6.5 kernel: then again games are of no interest to me.

pony-tail · Post by **pony-tail** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 11:01 pm

I would suggest one of the dual monitor Quadro cards(if you do not need high end 3D a Quadro4 MXR would be fine) although for dual monitor setup I use an Elsa Gloria III with an old Celeron passive heatsink glued ( Arctic silver adhesive ) on but this takes up the first pci slot .
Quadro cards are very well supported in Linux (SuSE and Fedora that I use anyway ) but Although a couple of my systems use geforce cards I have found that dual monitor does not always work out of the box . I have had good success with one very cheap geforce 4 MX440 card ( The box just says "3DForce4 MX440-8X " ) it is a Dual VGA out 64 meg card and comes with both Half height and full height adaptors . Although it ships with a fan any small heatsink will cool it , eg. an old Pentium one heatsink ,or a Zalman north bridge cooler .
There is just about a Dual Monitor capable ,Linux compatible , Passively coolable card for any budget .

pony-tail · Post by **pony-tail** » Wed Oct 13, 2004 11:08 pm

I just noticed on the box in Smaller print that the Geforce 4 MX440 is made in the USA by Jaton
It is this unit

GeForce MX 440
64Mb DDR Memory
VGA / VGA (Dual VGA)
Low Profile Capable
VM440-8A64V2

On this page
http://www.jaton.com.au/main/NVIDIAAGP.htm
They have a few to choose from and most likely have What you are looking for

hvengel · Post by **hvengel** » Thu Oct 14, 2004 7:00 am

I have been running a Matrox G450 with dual head. I am currently running SuSE 9.1 and have had zero problems with my video setup. Linux drivers for the G series Matrox cards are very good and has been for some time. You are right that the P series cards have very bad Linux drivers and Matrox does not seem to be too concerned about it. To bad since Matrox had a good rep in the Linux community until the P series cards. I have seen G450s on pricewatch for $29. It is passive, has very good 2D, supports 2 VGA connected monitors and will do 3D exceleration with 2 monitors if you install XOrg rather than X86Free.

DrJ · Post by **DrJ** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 11:11 am

I'm no XFree fanboy, but it is quite easy to have both monitors use hardware acceleration in XFree. You can run dual independent X sessions (one on each monitor), or MergedFB (a Xinerama-like mode that uses a single frame buffer); both will give full acceleration if you have the DRI extensions set up correctly. Only in Xinerama mode will you not have 3D acceleration. I doubt that X.org is any different this early on in its life.

FWIW, I use a G450 with two 19" CRTs in MergedFB mode when I need acceleration; Xinerama when I don't. This is in FreeBSD, but I doubt Linux is any different.

DrJ

DrJ · Post by **DrJ** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 12:52 pm

Let me address the question that started this thread.

You have two basic choices to get drivers that will work for you: the (old) open-source ones, and nVidia's binary ones. What you choose will largely be a function of what you want to do with your computer.

If you need fast 3D for games or solids rendering, then nVidia is the ONLY way to go. No other manufacturer has released drivers or specifications so that others can write drivers for their modern cards. My understanding is that nVidia's binary driver is unified, and will work for any of their cards (all the way back to the TNT). So choose a card that will meet your performance/cost/image quality/silence needs. Any of the more recent ones will do dual monitors. I'm no expert here, so I'm afraid I cannot give you a suggestion.

If you don't need 3D (or not much), then you can use the Open-source drivers with DRI acceleration. The Matrox G-series (G450, G550) work well. So do the older ATI cards (I can find the model numbers if you like), and the Savage and others (see the documentation for XFree or X.org). Many of these can support dual monitors, even in MergedFB mode.

But in comparison with modern cards these are really slow for 3D. REALLY slow. For text and photoimages they work just fine. That's my use, so for my dual 19" CRTs I use an old G450. It looks great, and is plenty fast enough (though I do wish it had dual Lookup Tables -- one for each monitor). Then again, I don't do games.

DrJ

Bat · Post by **Bat** » Tue Nov 23, 2004 9:03 am

Bear in mind that the binary-only drivers only work with certain specific kernel versions, and they are only for 32-bit i386: no use with AMD64 or other architectures.