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 Running kde3, that box works fine (it has long since been replaced by other boxes many times over -- but I still have it because it simply -- won't die!)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... 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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org