> I'll be in the market for a video card as soon as my budget allows, > following on from discovering the fan on it does zero rpm on a good day
Fans can be replaced. All chips will misbehave above a certain temperature, but with many chips it's only temporary, meaning if the temperature goes back to normal, the chips behaves itself again. Its life expectency is likely to be impaired, but you worry about that when it doesn't get back to normal. > I recall plenty of discussion on the list about supported and less > supported cards and chipsets. Depends on whether you want 2D or 3D. With 2D, pretty much anything works but I don't know about which gives best performance. With 3D, the chip market is between nvidia and ATI, both proprietory, neither with open source drivers, and only nvidia with (binary-only) Linux drivers. The choice is clear. As for chipsets, anything less than nvidia 6200 is outdated. Watch out - there is a very common 6200TC version (Turbo Crap, Turbo Castrated, or aka nvidia: Turbo Cache) with a suck-performance. 6600-based cards are only fractionally more expensive and the best bang-for-buck. The 6800 range of chips is high-end, very expensive and full of testosterone, but of little practical value unless you're into top-end gaming or boy-racer computing (and prepared to pay the 4 digits for it). "3D" refers to a certain class of graphics acceleration, where the drawing of the pixels is handled by massively parallel hardware on the graphics card, as opposed to be drawn by software routines executed by the main CPU. The time saving can be immense, but only on the very strict condition that your application software is able to generate the necessary graphics drawing commands. This leads to the ironic situation where there is more silicon in your graphics card than in your main CPU. This obviously also goes along with more power and more heat, and bigger and noisier fans on the graphics chip (though many CPU fans are impossible to beat, esp after 2 years when guarantee is expired and the fan bearings are on their way out). Most application software is unable to make use of 3D commands, so there's scope for disappointment. Software which is able to make use of it includes special 3D-screen savers (in other words, visual gimmicks of no practical use), the new 3D warp-n-whatnot desktops SUSE 10.1 has just been released with, high-end CAD software (there's little for Linux though), and synthetic animation players. I call it synthetic when it is synthesised from simple geometric shapes, like macromedia flash. If the animation is a sequence of mpeg frames, like you have with movies, the technique used is very different and nothing of it will gain from 3D. It is however possible that some very expensive cards have an mpeg-decoder implemented in hardware on the card, for playing movies (this has nothing to do with 3D). One word about cards if you care about noise: choose very carefully. All the fan-models probably sound like vacuum cleaners, despite their manufacturer's claims to the contrary. Also, fans are often crappy and become even noisier with time. There are a few fanless cards around which use big heat sinks and heat pipes, like the Gigabyte GV-NX66256DP, with a GeForce 6600 chip, currently $215. You must provide for enough air flow around the heat sinks though, otherwise I've measured over 100°C heat sink temperature - which will impair life expectency, although the card's manual does not specify that to be out of operating range, so I'd expect some 3-year warranty cases there. The 6200 chip (not TC, and not GT) is as much 3D as you'll be able to make use of without high-end gaming, as far as I can tell. This card is plug-n-go with Linux, and with SUSE 10.0 the binary-only driver was one click worth to get going. There are no cards with 6200GT or above chips without fan (not 6 months ago anyway), they make too much heat even for a big sink. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
