On Sat, 2002-10-19 at 15:50, Vincent Meyer, MD wrote: > Thanks to everybody who offered suggestions as what brands work well and which > ones don't. I've always had good luck with Dell, but every company has their > good days and bad, I guess. The IBM ThinkPad's look good, too. Was also > considering HP and Sony. Definite requirement after 2 years of problems with > getting a Trident video card to behave with XFree that the video has to be > well supported and have working hardware 3D. Of course, being reliable, > light, fast, with a big screen and all the toys would be nice too :-) > > So... laptop video.. Some of the Dell machines come with Radeon 7500's for > video. Is the support for the mobile version of this chip the same as for > the 7500 based PCI cards? What other laptop videos have proven themselves > to be Linux friendly?
There's four chipsets to get halfway decent hardware 3D on a laptop. Mobile Radeon 7500, Mobile Radeon 9000, Geforce2Go and Geforce4Go. I believe the GF2Go and GF4Go either are or will be supported by NVIDIA's binary drivers, so if you're one who doesn't have issues with the nvidia drivers, they'd be fine. I'm not completely up on ATI support, but I know the Mobile Radeons are very, very similar to the desktop chipsets (the 9000 is basically identical), so if the desktop ones are supported, I'd be very surprised if the mobile ones weren't. There are other laptop chipsets which supposedly support 3D, but they're more decelerators than accelerators :). Dell is the main company which sells laptops with these chipsets - it has a couple of models which can have either ATI or NVIDIA chipsets at the buyer's choice. Don't know who else uses them, offhand, I don't think Sony or IBM do. -- adamw
