On Tuesday 01 February 2005 19:56, Preston Crawford wrote:
what's a good low-end business video card that will drive my monitor at 1024x768 at a refresh rate of 85? Depends on what your needs are? If the onboard works good enough (anything semi recent with at least 8mb videoram can do 1024x768@85hz), stick to it. If you just want something that can give you hardware overlay (to watch movies), and basic hardware 3D (not a too bad idea as graphics used in desktop looks gets heavier) go for a low end Radeon, like the one you have - but buy a decent board, Gigabyte or something. I made the mistake of buying a card from PowerColor. Once you get it going you can see the chip is good, but the card's firmware is crap and it gives me all sorts of hassles. Anyways, the 7500 is still available, and natively supported by Xfree and X.Org with all it's features.
Alternatively a low end nVidia card - TNT2 or GeForce2 or GeForce4MX (which is really nothing but a rebadged Geforce2MX). You'll need to load the nVidia driver, but that's a pretty smooth operation these days... -- Kind regards Hans du Plooy Newington Consulting Services hansdp at newingtoncs dot co dot za