I have a openSUSE Leap 15.4 installation on a optiplex GX620 with Intel Pentium D and a Nvidia GT 9600 video card (using Nouveau out of the box and no proprietary Nvidia drivers installed) that I plan to move to a optiplex 780 with Intel Core 2 Duo (Q43/Q45 chipset) integrated graphics card GMA X4500.
My question is whether I need to do anything in particular for the operating system to recognize the different video card (Nvidia vs integrated intel). As I mentioned, I do not have any proprietary Nvidia drivers installed (it uses Nouveau by default).
The reason why I would like to stick with the integrated graphics in the new system is that I would like it to be a quiet system. I tried Nvidia Asus GT 1030 but the heat sink hits the housing of the cooling fan. If anybody has any recommendations for a Nvidia video card that is silent and would fit inside the housing of a optiplex 780, I would like to hear it! As a comparison, I am able to fit a Nvidia Asus GT 430, which has a fan (but a bit too loud for me).
I have two SFF 780s, one with GMA producing glmark2 score 272, the other with passive cooled Dell Radeon HD 6450 producing glmark2 score 951. Both are equally quiet. The one with Radeon costs roughly USD$0.30/month more electricity if run 24/7. I also have a SFF 760 with passive cooled Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 producing glmark2 score 619 with modesetting DIX display driver, and 798 using radeon DDX display driver. Only significant difference between 760 and 780 that I recall is DDR2 in 760 and DDR3 in 780. Each of these 3 Dells are running an e8400 Core2Duo CPU. They are noticeably faster than my 620s and 745.
Without having ever installed proprietary NVidia drivers, the switch should be painless and automatic for the graphics whether using the IGP or a Radeon, unless you have custom settings configured in /etc/X11/ somewhere.
If you’ve never upgraded from HDD to SSD before, now would be an ideal opportunity to upgrade both storage and Leap. Even though the 780 only has SATA 2.0, there’s a quite obvious I/O speed difference between my 780 with Seagate HDD and the other with Pioneer SSD.
Thanks for the detailed descriptions. In case of the Dell Radeon HD 6450 and the Sapphire Radeon HD 5450, do you use them with opensource drivers (i.e., already included in the distribution by default) or with proprietary AMD drivers?
You’re obviously new here. Last thing I bought that required proprietary anything was a Logitech Harmony remote control, probably 20 years ago. I’ve never even contemplated installing proprietary drivers in Linux on any PC I own. I did once install NVidia drivers for someone else, but I got paid to do it.
I did once install NVidia drivers for someone else, but I got paid to do it.