[LAU] Suggested video card

david gnome at hawaii.rr.com
Wed Aug 15 01:17:54 EDT 2007


Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 23:47 -1000, david wrote:
> 
>>>> So, depending on the laptop that "schrieb david" owns,
>> That's me. My laptop is too low-budget to have expandable video 
>> capabilities.
> 
> The most recent Dell I saw with expandable graphics (note, they didn't advertise that you could expand them) was under $1000 new.

Mine's a Toshiba Satellite model bought back near the end of 2004 for $600.

>> I'm not planning to do any such heavy-duty work on the laptop. By the 
>> time I have fluidsynth with a sound font loaded, jack, and Rosegarden 
>> going, doing anything else with the system while playing a composition 
>> is sufficient to interrupt the audio momentarily - particularly if I'm 
>> playing from the Score editor. I blame it on the Intel graphics 
>> hardware. Or maybe a 1.5GHz Celeron just hasn't enough oomph to do it 
>> with Intel graphics around. And I'm not even using any kind of effects 
>> or filtering.
> 
> You still haven't said what graphics you actually have.

855GM according to KInfoCenter's PCI report.

> There is a wide
> range of Intel graphics out there from the i810 (I'm ignoring the older
> stuff that could be gotten as a separate AGP card) to the current 965.
> I doubt that you have a 800 series chip in a Celeron with that clock,
> but I doubt that you have a 965 either.  But as for as I know, that
> still leaves the 855G, 915GM, 945GM, and GMA 950 as options.  I can't
> believe that a 945 or better is causing you your trouble, and I don't
> know about the 855 or 915.
> 
> OTOH, I wouldn't be happy with a celeron, although I've seen other
> people refer to using them happily. 
> 
>> I'm planning to move the music work to either my Sempron 3000 box 
>> (currently being our network server) or the "newest" addition to the 
>> network, a box with a 1.8GHz Athlon (the old style "significant 
>> contributor to global warming" processor). The old server box has an 
>> NVidia GeForce2 MX display adapter, and 1GB of RAM. The Athlon box will 
>> end up with another NVidia GeForce2 MX adapter and have 1GB RAM. They'll 
>> both have much better audio cards than the laptop's Intel HDA audio!
> 
> Moving to a desktop system may be a good idea.  I would prefer to
> "upgrade" which ever system I used with an ATI Radeon, but maybe you are
> happy with the Nv driver.

So far.

> I just bought a stack of Radeon 7200s for $5
> apiece just for putting into older Linux PCs with Geforce 2MX cards.

I got these free. I don't do games on any of my computers, so more 
powerful display cards don't really do anything for me.

> Also, to quote from another email you sent:
> 
>> Sorry, no - I dashed that off fast, neglecting to mention that I've 
>> never encountered Intel graphics on any separate card - I've seen them 
>> on many many laptops and a growing number of desktop motherboards (I 
>> have two such mobos here). In all cases, the Intel graphics steals 
>> memory from the system.
> 
> In the Dell Inspiron P-M that I was recently seeing inside (the above
> one that was under $1000 when new 1.5-2 years ago), the intel graphics
> were on the motherboard and were overridden by a ATI card when present.
> So, not since the original i710 have I seen Intel graphics that wasn't
> on the motherboard.  It doesn't always steal RAM though.  Or maybe it is
> and it does it more subtly than the ProSavage did.  In my P3 with i810
> graphics, /proc/meminfo says it has 384M of RAM, just like I installed,
> while Athlon with the Savage onboard graphics said that it had 608megs
> installed when it was really 640megs.  When I turned off the built in
> graphics on the motherboard and put in a Radeon 7200 AGP
> card, /proc/meminfo now reads 640 megs.

My laptop has 768meg in it; /proc/meminfo reports MemTotal 742976kB. 
Looking in kern.log, the kernel reports 32636 stolen memory. Sorry, was 
wrong about the amount being stolen on the laptop.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community



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