[LAU] Advice on hardwware components

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 04:39:31PM +0100, Michael TD Nelson wrote:

> I have been hoping to find something fanless on eBay UK. I was mainly 
> hoping to get some reassurance that drivers are ok on modern(ish) ATI 
> and nVidia cards. I'll keep looking, and wait until a bargain comes along.

I wouldn't call the opensource drivers OKish for Nvidia.

I think your best best for a PCI-E card is somewhere from a ATI x300 to
ATI x850.  Stay away from X1000 or newer.
 
> On a slightly different note - are there any cards which have good 3d 
> performance with open drivers? I probably won't use it yet, but it would 
> be nice to know about...

The ATI X300 to X850 range are reasonably decent using the open source
ATI drivers.  That range of cards is probably the best graphics for a
completely open source linux machine.  I would say that they are easily
faster than the Intel 965 graphics at this time.  Long term, the Intel
graphics may end up being a better choice, but for now I think that the
slightly older ATI is best.