Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (929 mails)

[Tejas Guruswamy <tejas.guruswamy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 30/08/11 13:04, George OLson wrote:
> On 08/30/2011 06:58 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:
> > George,
> >
> > 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:
> >
> > http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/132
> >
> > (there is also an ati page, but I'd stay with nvidia)
> >
> > If you can get a card with a memory transfer rate in the 18GB/s range,
> > you will be fine. (14 GB/s range is OK, anything less -- well, you could
> > do better) You want a 256-bit card, not a 128 bit card. I did a short
> > write-up on why that matters a few years back:
> > http://www.3111skyline.com/hardware/graphics.php
> >
> > I have an old dell PIII-800 w/384M that I put an old nvidia 5900 Ultra
> > graphics card in. Running kde3, that box works fine (it has long since
> > been replaced by other boxes many times over -- but I still have it
> > because it simply -- won't die!) System responsiveness is enjoyable. It
> > handles all the apps you could want (just one or two at a time :)
> Thanks! I will have to look up the hardwaresecrets site. I am glad it 
> works better now!
>
> George

Tom's Hardware also publish a very useful "Graphics Card Hierarchy 
Chart" at the end of their buyers guide each month.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-performance-radeon-geforce,review-32251-7.html

As the author states: "I don’t recommend upgrading your graphics card 
unless the replacement card is at least three tiers higher. Otherwise, 
the upgrade is somewhat parallel and you may not notice a worthwhile 
difference in performance."

And as David says, a top-of-the-line card from a few years ago still 
outperforms the low-end cards from today, and can be had extremely 
cheaply. The only difference is in software support (it may not support 
the latest DirectX 11 / OpenGL 4 / whatever), but if you're not playing 
the latest games, that's fine.

Regards,
Tejas
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