What Video Card?

March 28, 2005 10:14 AM

I have a 19" LCD monitor w/ a DVI-D port on order. What video card should I get?

The monitor's a Dell 1905FP: 1280 x 1074 @ 60 Hz or 75 Hz, .294mm dot pitch, 800:1 contrast ratio. The machine's a Dell PowerEdge 400SC with an 8x AGP slot, of which the previous link says: "The AGP socket is keyed for universal 0.8v AGP cards that comply with the AGP 3.0 specification or 1.5v AGP cards that comply with the AGP 2.0 specification. The AGP connector supports 8x, 4x AGP 3.0 add-in cards operating at 0.8v, or AGP 2.0 add-in cards operating at 1.5V. There is no support for AGP 2x operation or legacy 3.3V AGP cards."

I'm not much of a gamer (Civ3's the most graphics-intensive game I gave,) but would like to have smooth DVD playback. I would like to use it under Gentoo Linux, and it sounds like people have better experience with Nvidia and Matrox Linux drivers than ATI. I'm interested in the option of HDTV playing, but probably not if it adds a lot to the price. Finally, I'm cheap (haven't bought a new video card since about 2000.)

I researched this yesterday, but video card reviews are very gamer-centric.

So I appeal to the collective wisdom of AskMe: what DVI-D card with good DVD playback, adequate 2-D gaming, and decent Linux drivers would you recommend?

posted by Zed_Lopez to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

No answers, so I'll give you a half answer. You should pick the cheapest card with DVI that works on Linux. If you don't care about 3d performance any modern card is fast enough, and if you're using DVI then you don't care about the analog components. I'm not up on what X servers are supporting these days, but I'd look at their list of supported hardware and pick one.

One caveat: I don't know about DVD playback in X.
posted by Nelson at 12:50 PM on March 28, 2005

ATi and nVidia both have Linux drivers; both are fairly well supported using stock XFree/X.org X server stuff too. Anything cheap and recent will probably do what you want. You can get a GeForce MX4000 for around $40 now; you could do that or get an ATi Radeon 9200. Just make sure you get a DVI port.

Both ATi and nVidia provide closed-source drivers. There are open-source ones for ATi cards (which I believe ATi contributes to - either that or just to the reg. X.org server) Not sure about the nVidia ones. You will have to check a bit more to ensure your drivers are compatible with whatever Linux distro you're using. The default drivers, though, should be pretty OK though. FWIW your machine should be fast enough to play DVDs OK thru software - I'm not entirely sure but I don't believe the default X.org servers for ATi and nVidia cards are accelerated (the vendor-supplied ones will be though) but either way you probably won't notice much of a difference.
posted by mrg at 1:58 PM on March 28, 2005

I'd throw in a vote for nVidia over ATI.

ATI has really gone into the crapper of late.
posted by mosch at 10:47 PM on March 28, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks. I opted for an nVidia GeForce FX5200 for $52.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 10:04 AM on March 29, 2005