I have an old E-MACHINE with a 400MHZ Celeron CPU.
RAM: 512
HDD: 20 GB
ONBOARD GRAPHICS: ATI RAGE PRO-AGP over PCI BUS. (thats what it says anyway)
I installed Open SUSE 11.3 LXDE. I installed from the live CD.
Dragging windows around is choppy obviously.
I am thinking of buying a PCI video card to improve performance but would like some input.
First I would like know how much improvement can I expect to see with a better video card.
I need to know if the video card will pickup the slack from the Celeron CPU.
If a video card will improve performance then I would like opinions on the list of video cards below. One note I would like to mention is that I have another system that is a Pentium III 600MHZ with 192MB RAM and also onboard video but it will load games from pogo.com.
My E-MACHINE starts loading the games but then crashes. I dont know if thats java related or not at this time though because the Pentium III machine is using sun java and my E-MACHINE is using Icetea java.
Now for the list:
ATI:
Series: Radeon 9
Model: Radeon 9200
Graphics Processor: RV280
Bus Type: PCI
Memory Type: DDR
Memory: 128MB
Memory(MHZ): 366 MHZ
Core Clock: 200 MHZ
Bit: 64 bit
Maximum Resolution: 1600x1200
ATI:
Model Radeon 9250
Memory: 256MB
Bit: 128 bit
NVIDIA:
Series: Geforce FX
Model: Geforce FX5500
Graphics Processor: NV34B
Bus Type: PCI
Memory Type: DDR
Memory: 256MB
Memory(MHZ) 266MHZ
Core Clock: 250MHZ
Bit: 128 bit
Maximum Resolution: 2048x1536
If you have any other suggestions just keep in mind that it has to be a PCI video card.
Thanks,
You’re running some seriously old hardware. 512MB of ram these days is hardly sufficient. Same with a 400Mhz celeron CPU.
Computers are cheap these days. Even the cheapest piece of **** you can buy in a store nowadays would run circles around your system.
Have you installed the 3rd party ATI drivers? That might help a little, but you’re still going to have a slow system.
I picked up a geforce mx 4000 today from my brother. I’m going to give that a try.
I realize its an old computer though, and thats why Im putting linux on it. I have a main system, and laptop with dual core cpus and lots of ram running windows7.
I also have a little acer revo that I upgraded the ram on and its running windows7.
These old machines I play with are just things Ive had laying around and I recently felt the urge to play with linux again so I thought I would give it a shot.
NVIDIA:
Series: Geforce FX
Model: Geforce FX5500
Graphics Processor: NV34B
Bus Type: PCI
Memory Type: DDR
Memory: 256MB
Memory(MHZ) 266MHZ
Core Clock: 250MHZ
Bit: 128 bit
Maximum Resolution: 2048x1536
I have been using that same card in an AMD64 3400 for over six years with terrific performance. Considerably better than the ATI graphics in my newer hardware. But your CPU may cancel out any improvement in video performance. Another 512mb of memory may help.
Bob
I went ahead and installed this Geforce mx 4000 I got from my brother. I must have messed up the install because now I cant get into the LXDE desktop.
I only get command line interface. Should I start a new thread or can I get some xorg support here?
if i read your post correctly you will be limited to AGP graphic cards so your choices will be limited, and although ATI has more sophisticated hardware for AGP, if you play video at all there is no hardware assisted method for accelerating video with ATI (yet) as far as i know.
i believe nvidia will give you a better experience given the limitations.
So I went ahead installing the Nvidia MX4000. I could not find drivers for the MX4000 in yast, however the Nvidia website had a linux driver that said it worked with my card. I downloaded it then went through some process of installing GCC, MAKE, and the kernal source before I could run the Nvidia installer.
At the end it said it was successful and that I needed to run sax2 to setup my display. I could not run sax2 for some reason. It kept saying it could not find the command and that I could do “cnf sax2” to find it. The cnf command could not find it. I tried using the command “zypper install sax2”. That command said sax2 was installed basically and there was nothing to do.
So I just reboot. I now have an Nvidia control center I can run but as far as performance I havent noticed any difference and do not know if the driver is actually being used since I could not run sax2.
sax2 doesn’t exist anymore. if you can run nvidia-control and it doesn’t tell you that it can’t find an nvidia card, your NV card is being used. you can play around with the NV settings and see what performance you can get, but in your case the bottleneck seems to be CPU & RAM, so i’m afraid not much can be done.
i’m not sure if LXDE has desktop effects, would think not. if there are such effects, disable them all, since those eat quite a bit of your available performance.
–
phani.
Hey, sorry to interrupt, but can someone offer their perspective on the current ATI situation in OpenSUSE? 
I guess I’m wondering if there’s an assessment for the most recent ver. which I believe is 11.3.
The kernel’s at 2.6.34 and Xorg-Server 1.8. I guess experimenting with the latest development version would be out (as per usual??) but maybe the most recent ATI cards are usable?
So, any perspective on ATI’s HD 5000 series? I guess Nvidia cards work for the most part so I am wondering about a comparison with ATI HD 5750/5770 cards, for instance.
??? 