Green Graphics Adapter Recommendation

[Jarod Wilson]

On Sat, 2008-10-18 at 11:21 -0400, Bob - BLU wrote:
> On 10/17/2008 05:15 PM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 16:54 -0400, Bob - BLU wrote:
> >> I was thinking an NVidia based card as they seem to have the best
> drivers (proprietary is acceptable here).
> >>
> >> Any recommendations for a 'green' card?
> > 
> > Anything fanless, as they're already predisposed to using less power
> > than cards w/fans. Personally, for that particular job, I'd stay away
> > from proprietary drivers, as that's an unneeded hassle -- the free
> > drivers for both ATI and nVidia cards should do just fine. I'd probably
> > go with something like an ATI Radeon X550 or an nVidia GeForce 6200 -- a
> > few generations old, and thus had cheaply and likely well-supported even
> > by an "older" distro (*cough* RHEL), and both available in fanless
> > variants.
> 
> Well reasoned, thank you.
> 
> If I step too far back on the tech curve I will end up with a different connector.

The Radeon X550 and nVidia GeForce 6200 can both be found in PCI Express
x16 variants. They might be 1.1 cards, but 2.0 slots are backwards
compatible with 1.1 cards.

> On open source drivers, can one assume that the ATI (Radeon) drivers are better
> (subjective) than the NVidia (GeForce) drivers.  I'll make the assumption that for
> my needs this is a rather moot discussion.

The free radeon driver, at least for older cards (including the X550, I
have a fanless PCI-E x16 one), include basic 3D support, whereas the
free nv driver does not. There's the relatively new nouveau driver for
nvidia cards that does do 3D, and I've actually had good success with it
on an old AGP GF6200, iirc.

--jarod