On 2011/08/29 17:58 (GMT-0500) David C. Rankin composed:
A couple of other point with older boxes. You can make them very responsive by focusing on the normal bottlenecks of disk I/O and graphics I/O. A dependable 7200 rpm drive compatible with your system will do as much for you as is possible on the disk side. On the graphics side, you can get a used nvidia card for the box for less than $20 that will make a huge amount of difference with graphics response. The hardwaresecrets site used to have a comparison chart for all the gpu's going back 5-6 years that compared memory clock/pixel clock/shader clocks etc.. that was a great reference for older cards. What you care about is 'memory bandwidth' or 'memory transfer rate'. Here it is:
(there is also an ati page, but I'd stay with nvidia)
In recent months, probably at least 8, many older NVidia cards are a disaster. Neither of mine work in 12.1, *buntu 11.04, Fedora 15 or Mandriva 2011.0 with FOSS drivers, and I refuse to use proprietary drivers of any kind while running any Linux. X bugs in freedesktop, kernel & openSUSE for nouveau for NVidia chips I don't have seem to get a lot of activity. Buying an older NVidia card now could be a lot of grief. OTOH, X on all my puters with ATI or Intel video work OK. I don't do games, and I use my TV for watching TV - it's big enough to be suitable for that purpose. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org