Need video card that is quiet and works under Linux...

Magic · Post by **Magic** » Sun Nov 07, 2004 2:50 pm

Hi... I have a fairly new 3.2 GHz Pentium IV with a gig of Ram that I built a while ago to be extra quiet. I'm still using a four year old Matrox card from my previous computer, so I figure it's time to finally upgrade my video.

Today I have a Viewsonic 22" monitor that I run at 1600x1200 @ 85 hz and a Viewsonic 19" monitor that I run at 1280x1024 (also at 85hz.)

Soon I'll be upgrading my main monitor to be one of these 1920x1200 lcd panels that seem to be appearing on the market. Eventually I'll probably get a smaller second lcd as well.

So the way I see it:

I'd like a graphics card that is preferably completely silent, although if I can modify it to be silent without too much hassle, that will be okay.

I'd like it to have two dvi-i ports.

It would be a nice bonus if it also had tv out.

It needs to work really well under Linux, and hopefully will work right out of the box on a recent distribution (although I'm willing to spend the time getting it to work if I need to).

I'd like to spend around $150 to $250 although I could spend a bit more, and wouldn't mind spending less.

What do you guys recommend? If you want to recommend a card, but don't know if it works under Linux that will be okay too...I can hunt down Linux compatiblity information elsewhere.

Thanks

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Sun Nov 07, 2004 2:59 pm

The closest thing I can think of would be the Matrox P650, but Linux support appears to be a bit questionable. The G550-dual DVI may also work for you as well.

Mupp · Post by **Mupp** » Sun Nov 07, 2004 3:10 pm

I have one of these, dual dvi and tv-out, I use it with two Eizo 17" TFT's, works like a charm. The only two issues I have with it is that NVidia's linux driver has a bit of a hard time with DPMS in linux, my #2 monitor doesn't shut down during powersave more than occationally, whereas the primary always powers off. The second issue would be that the card isn't 'that' powerful when playing your favourite flightsim in windows, but it isn't very pricey either, certainly not now, I've had mine for 6 months or so. But I would absolutely recommend it!

Edit: Forgot, I have one of these on it, without the fan. Quieter than a mouse, and easy to install.

Magic · Post by **Magic** » Sun Nov 07, 2004 3:14 pm

sthayashi wrote:The closest thing I can think of would be the Matrox P650, but Linux support appears to be a bit questionable. The G550-dual DVI may also work for you as well.

Thanks...although I enjoyed my Matrox card, I sort of thought they weren't keeping up these days with the competition from ATI and Nvidia?

Magic · Post by **Magic** » Sun Nov 07, 2004 3:15 pm

Mupp wrote:I have one of these, dual dvi and tv-out, I use it with two Eizo 17" TFT's, works like a charm. The only two issues I have with it is that NVidia's linux driver has a bit of a hard time with DPMS in linux, my #2 monitor doesn't shut down during powersave more than occationally, whereas the primary always powers off. The second issue would be that the card isn't 'that' powerful when playing your favourite flightsim in windows, but it isn't very pricey either, certainly not now, I've had mine for 6 months or so. But I would absolutely recommend it!

This looks nice, but it has a fan on it. Did you replace the fan with a heatsink?

Edit: Just saw your edit! We're working in parallel here I guess.

Thank you. Anyone else have any recommendations?

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Sun Nov 07, 2004 3:26 pm

Magic wrote:
sthayashi wrote:The closest thing I can think of would be the Matrox P650, but Linux support appears to be a bit questionable. The G550-dual DVI may also work for you as well.
Thanks...although I enjoyed my Matrox card, I sort of thought they weren't keeping up these days with the competition from ATI and Nvidia?

Not in the 3d realm, though rumors are that their 2d is still up there.

starcycle · Post by **starcycle** » Mon Nov 08, 2004 12:13 pm

i'd go with the matrox. their 2D is the best. i have a g450 dvi and it was a snap to set up in linux (definitely easier than my radeon, at least

).

also see:
2cpu .com list of dual dvi cards

Magic · Post by **Magic** » Mon Nov 08, 2004 3:56 pm

starcycle wrote:i'd go with the matrox. their 2D is the best. i have a g450 dvi and it was a snap to set up in linux (definitely easier than my radeon, at least ).

also see:
2cpu .com list of dual dvi cards

Okay...silly question, but if you encode a cd with flac under Linux, and then play the flacs and then you start moving windows around do you hear a very minute pause every once in a while? That's one of the problems that I think a new video card will solve.

starcycle · Post by **starcycle** » Mon Nov 08, 2004 6:33 pm

Magic wrote:Okay...silly question, but if you encode a cd with flac under Linux, and then play the flacs and then you start moving windows around do you hear a very minute pause every once in a while? That's one of the problems that I think a new video card will solve.

hmm, no pauses here. i usually use lame, though, or vorbis. no pauses while encoding video, either. is it just something to do with flac, do you mean?

Magic · Post by **Magic** » Tue Nov 09, 2004 12:07 pm

starcycle wrote:
Magic wrote:Okay...silly question, but if you encode a cd with flac under Linux, and then play the flacs and then you start moving windows around do you hear a very minute pause every once in a while? That's one of the problems that I think a new video card will solve.
hmm, no pauses here. i usually use lame, though, or vorbis. no pauses while encoding video, either. is it just something to do with flac, do you mean?

Yes, it definitely only shows up for me under flac, not other codecs (but flac of course has far more bits). Oh, and sorry if I wasn't clear but I meant playback. Encoding, ironically is fine.

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Mupp · Post by **Mupp** » Wed Nov 10, 2004 1:52 am

This sounds somewhat similar to what happened on some epia boards, where you could get strange sound distortions when moving windows and such. I doubt it being for the same reasons though, the epias aren't very powerful, and I don't know if you have any hardware found on the epia. But you can atleast try the 'solution' for the epias, in the 'Devices' section, put:

Code: Select all

Option       "PciRetry"          "True"

It's a long shot, but worth a try maybe.

Edit: Having looked at what people with more knowledge than me say about it, if you already have this set, you could try setting it to false. You could also try the option 'PciBurst' true and false.

DrJ · Post by **DrJ** » Wed Nov 10, 2004 5:59 pm

I went through the same question when I set up my dual-monitor FreeBSD system. What you have to answer is "what do you want to use your computer for?"

If you only need a 2D system (namely, you don't play games or do solids rendering) then a Matrox with the open-source driver works well. The G550 will work fine. Forget the cards based on the Parhelia (the "P" series) -- there are no drivers to speak of.

If you want to play games, then your only real choice is nVidia. Their binary drivers have gotten better, and enable full 3D capabilities which are far, far better than the Matrox cards. I'm no expert here, but I'd suggest searching this board for what others have found for getting a quiet system from nVidia products. I believe that most of the recent cards support dual monitors, though you will have to check on DVI compatibility.

FWIW, I went with a Matrox G450 (which drives dual 19" Sony CRTs), but then, I do no 3D work. It works well, particularly in the MergedFB mode in XFree86 (or X.org) where DRI acceleration is available on both screens.

DrJ

Magic · Post by **Magic** » Wed Nov 24, 2004 11:06 pm

Thanks for all the advice. I haven't tried changing the PciRetry line, but I will.

Thinking back, I think the problem must have been introduced with some X upgrade or other. It turns out that by going from 24 bit to 16 bit everything works fine (except, of course, I now have 16 bit graphics....which is unfortunate because I sometimes do photo editing...)

I think I'll stick with running my card at 16 bit for a while, until I find the perfect card. My Viewsonic PF815 monitor will be exactly five years old next September. So I might wait until then and get both a new graphics card and a 1920x1200 LCD.

Bat · Post by **Bat** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 4:01 pm

Does DVI support 1920x1200 though, or only up to 1600x1200?

widman · Post by **widman** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 6:06 pm

Matrox G550 only support DVI up to 1280x1024 and not supported widescreen yet.

pony-tail · Post by **pony-tail** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 3:58 pm

Get a cheap second hand Ti 4400 or 4600 and put a Zalman heatpipe cooler on it you can not get much quieter tha that and not to many $$$ either . Linux support is excellent for these cards or if you have lots of $$ to spend do the same with a Quadro4 dual DVI card ( I use one of these on a Linux box with Kubuntu and it works exceptionally well but the Zalman was a pr*ck to install on it ,though definately worth the bother )

rei · Post by **rei** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 7:51 pm

It's a little overpriced, but the Asus EN6600 SILENCER is passive, and dual-DVI. It sells in Canada for $150-180. PCI-Express though not AGP.

uchat · Post by **uchat** » Mon Aug 22, 2005 11:27 pm

Magic wrote: Okay...silly question, but if you encode a cd with flac under Linux, and then play the flacs and then you start moving windows around do you hear a very minute pause every once in a while? That's one of the problems that I think a new video card will solve.

you might want to try recompile your kernel with preemptible kernel option turned on. Some distributions, like fedora I think, has it turned off by default. It basically will give higher priority to user activities like playing sound, etc. To users, it feels like the system is more interactive, because user processes don't need to wait for the kernel to finish its job anymore.

ckolivas · Post by **ckolivas** » Tue Aug 23, 2005 6:03 am

Check your X server is not reniced. See
http://ck.kolivas.org/audio_hints.txt for more info.

Plasma · Post by **Plasma** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 3:33 am

Uh... if you need 1900x1200 level resolution, I don't think you can do it with the current nVidia cards from what I'm told. Do check up on it, but I was told that ATI can do it because of their higher quality DVI chipsets, but nVidia can't operate at that because it's strictly speaking beyond spec for a single link DVI. Matrox I'm not sure, I'm sure it'd be supported under linux for 2d, there's bloody well nothing which isn't, but don't count on the 3d.