Kevin_Gassiot@veritasdgc.com wrote:
I have a machine under my desk right now with the Tyan S2895 PCI-Express motherboard and an Nvidia 6800 Ultra PCIE graphics card, running the 7174 driver. I had to use the "noapic pci=noacpi" options to get things to work. I ran my own OpenGL benchmark, and things seemed fine, and then I ran the Viewperf OpenGL benchmarks continuously for 24 hours with no hiccups... We have some of the HPs on order, but they are not in yet...
The only machine I have had that used an FX3400 was one of the new Dell workstations with the Intel EM64T cpus. I wasn't able to get Suse and the Nvidia drivers to run properly on it, and Dell had some pre-packaged RPMs that you had to use with RedHat to make the graphics work properly. But, that machine is so new, I didn't expect everything to work out of the box :)
AGP will probably be phased out over time. Most of the OEMs are selling PCI-e systems now, and the AGP systems have gone away (in the workstation part of the market). The high-end laptops we were buying (Dell M60) was replaced with a new M70 model with PCI-e graphics. Look at all of HP's and Dell's workstations, and they all are PCI-e based. The lower end machines have integrated graphics, or a few still have AGP. In the lower end, and consumer space, where you are more concerned with backwards compatibility for the upgrade market, the AGP based boards will probably be around for quite awhile. You don't want to force somebody to have to replace ALL of their accessory cards when they are trying to do a piecemeal upgrade :)
And by the way, the Tyan board in this machine has 2 x16 PCI-e slots, so you can drive 2 graphics cards at full speed (hook them together under Windows for certain games...) The ASUS SLI board with Athlon 64 cpu and dual 6800GTs is the gamers wet dream now :)
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/index.html
Kevin
Kevin Gassiot Advanced Systems Group Visualization Systems Support
Veritas DGC 10300 Town Park Dr. Houston, Texas 77072 832-351-8978 kevin_gassiot@veritasdgc.com
Thanks again for your thorough comments Kevin. I was only using the "noapic" boot option before. Adding the "pci=noacpi" option doesn't make a difference for me. Do you happen to see any 'Xid' errors in your syslog on your machine? There's a *lot* of activity on the nvidia linux forum (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14) about GeForce FX 6*** cards with the most recent nvidia driver causing all sorts of trouble with Xid errors, and if you aren't having trouble I think they'd love to hear from you over there. Of course, most of them are using AGP cards, and tend to do a lot of OpenGL intensive / Gaming. Ken -- Ken Siersma, Software Engineer EKK, Inc. phone: (248) 624-9957 fax: (248) 624-7158 http://www.ekkinc.com -- "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -MLK Jr.