Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 22:09:22 -0500 (EST) From: "Michael L. Squires" <mikes@siralan.org> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: the best graphicscard for FreeBSD Message-ID: <20041203215433.X18754@familysquires.net> In-Reply-To: <20041204000018.GA52176@slackbox.xs4all.nl> References: <87zn15zoqo.fsf@basilikum.skogtun.org> <41A63A78.2030506@mukappabeta.de> <41A9CC27.3030408@saunalahti.fi> <41AA70E3.2000108@mukappabeta.de> <20041203193450.037d5e7a.gstewart@bonivet.net> <20041203230906.248e8311.gstewart@bonivet.net> <20041204003549.2803a7fc.gstewart@bonivet.net> <20041204000018.GA52176@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
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I've been experimenting with various cards, most cheap. The monitors are HP P1110 21" surplus, very bright (too bright) and very sharp. These are the PC version with VGA connectors, not the ones with BNC connectors. I currently have a Matrox G450 in dual-head mode under 5.3-STABLE with Xorg, updated a couple of days ago from ports. Xinerama is very nice; the only problem I have is that MS Windows XP appears to leave the card in a wierd state, and I have to power cycle the system sometimes before the second monitor works correctly. This system is an old SM P6DGH dual PII/300 with an early AGP slot. I am moving to a newer machine, SM P4DCE+ dual Xeon 1.8GHZ. It came with a Radeon 7000 VE board which works fine with 5.3-STABLE/Xorg using the config written by Xorg. With versions before 5.3 I had to add radeondrm support, not now. Both agp/drm show on dmesg. This card works very well at 1280x1024, using very small characters - combination is as good as the 19" NEC plasma I have at work, except bigger (and hotter). (The Dell at work has a dual-head nVidia 5200 board). I bought a new nVida based FX5500 board to experiment. Trouble. The main problem is that the video amps don't have the bandwidth to show sharp characters on the screen at 1280x1024 at any refresh I've tried. nVidia does have drivers for FreeBSD 5.21 and later, but I haven't tried them. (I tried both FreeBSD with the "nv" driver and MS Windows XP using the MS certified nVidia FX5500 driver). I suspect that name-brand nVida-based cards would be better (I can't even find a name on this one, other than "nVidia"), but my mind is already made up. For the moment I'm sticking with ATI-made Radeon cards; my next one will probably be either an 8400 dual head or a 9200 dual head. I just have to find a game player who wants an nVidia FX5500/256MB dual head card cheap. Mike Squires
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