I know there’s going to be a lot of “it depends” to this question.
I need to reduce my power consumption. I am thinking of consolidating my existing cluster of 3 workstations and 1 windows machine into a cluster of 2 workstations, one of which will use vmware and wine as needed for windows software and entertainment (games).
I’m not a fan of fps type games - my biggest video users are things like Civ 4 and Anarchy Online.
Right now my entertainment system is a 32 bit Athlon XP chip with an AGP ATI X800 video card. The two workstations each have an HDAMA motherboard with PCI-X slots available.
The new entertainment workstation would be getting a fresh install of OpenSUSE 11.x (likely 11.0 because if I can I’d do this this weekend).
Questions
First, will a PCI-X 16 video card work in one of these available slots at all (the motherboard name, above, is a link to the mfr website)?
If it will, what type of card should I be looking for to be roughly equivalent to my existing performance given the PCI-X slots available?
What type of card should I look for to get to the recommended “3 - 4 steps up the tier performance” to justify a new video card purchase?
On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 17:16 +0000, Neophyte42 wrote:
> BACKGROUND INFORMATION
>
> I know there’s going to be a lot of “it depends” to this question.
>
> I need to reduce my power consumption. I am thinking of consolidating
> my existing cluster of 3 workstations and 1 windows machine into a
> cluster of 2 workstations, one of which will use vmware and wine as
> needed for windows software and entertainment (games).
>
> I’m not a fan of fps type games - my biggest video users are things
> like Civ 4 and Anarchy Online.
>
> Right now my entertainment system is a 32 bit Athlon XP chip with an
> AGP ATI X800 video card. The two workstations each have an ‘HDAMA’
> (http://tinyurl.com/oobrd) motherboard with PCI-X slots available.
>
> The new entertainment workstation would be getting a fresh install of
> OpenSUSE 11.x (likely 11.0 because if I can I’d do this this weekend).
>
>
> QUESTIONS
>
> First, will a PCI-X 16 video card work in one of these available slots
> at all (the motherboard name, above, is a link to the mfr website)?
No. PCI-X is NOT PCIe (PCI Express). Don’t confuse PCIe with PCI-X.
PCI-X is a 64bit PCI slot that is clocked at 66Mhz or higher (usually
100 or 133Mhz). With that said, PCI-X even if a video card exists
(and I don’t think it does) is not really that fast… at least not
in comparison to your AGP card you have today.
>
> If it will, what type of card should I be looking for to be roughly
> equivalent to my existing performance given the PCI-X slots available?
On that motherboard, you’ll want to use the onboard graphics… it
will be slow… you can get some PCI video cards that might
be a bit faster, but probably many times slower than your existing
AGP card.
>
> What type of card should I look for to get to the recommended “3 - 4
> steps up the tier performance” to justify a new video card purchase?
>
>
Get a different motherboard that either has AGP or PCIe slots in
it (if PCIe, get one that at least has a x16 connector otherwise
you’ll have to get out the saw).