On Saturday 19 October 2002 10:08 am, Adam Williamson wrote: > 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 would say go for nvidia. Currently, they are the only cards with decent GL drivers out there. Yes, some people have some issues with the drivers, but at least nvidia stands behind them. > 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. ATI desktop support is horrible, and mobile is even worse. Don't buy ATI. The best you could hope for are incredibly bad binary drivers that work half the time and are actually intended for a different card. That's what the 8500 drivers are like. The 9000 and up don't even have drivers yet, and they probably won't come out until the card is obsolete. In short: buy from the company that supports Linux - nvidia. -- -- Igor
