Paul Hartman posted on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 11:27:31 -0500 as excerpted: > I have an old Pentium 4 box which has a PCI-E video card. If a computer > is so old it doesn't even have PCI-E, its owner probably wouldn't expect > 3D desktop effects to work so well in the first place.
I'd contest that. Of course, if the video is that age too, yes. However, reasonably decent video is still available on AGP. I'm planning on updating to a Radeon x1950, top of the r5xx chip line, and not too shabby ATM, tho it'll be old by the time I'm done with it. The biggest problem is that such chips were generally already designed for PCI-E, and require a bridge chip to AGP, which adds significantly to the price while not exactly decreasing latency or increasing performance... The Radeon x1950 I'm looking at still runs $150, for instance, tho the performance is probably comparable to that of a more modern $50-$100 PCI-E card. That x1950 won't run the latest fancy games at the highest framerate, sure, but I'm not generally into such things anyway, and it should be more than adequate for OpenGL desktop effects, even across the two 1920x1200 DVI screen's I'll be plugging into it (that's the largest resolution DVI-D single-link is supposed to be able to serve, BTW, which is why there's a cutoff there), and even across the two 2560x1600 (each requiring dual-link DVI-D) I'd love to upgrade to at some point... And since I'm already running dual dual-core Opteron 290s (top of their line 2.8 GHz), with 8 gigs of RAM on an extremely well supported by both manufacturer and Linux Tyan mobo, with 4-way SATA based kernel/md RAID, I figure the base system should be good for a few more years yet. I just need to upgrade the graphics from the now aging Radeon 9200 I'm running now. When I upgrade again after that, I expect it to be to by then a single- chip oct-core or the like, maybe doubling the RAM to 16 gig, maybe a couple terabytes SSD storage, who /knows/ what graphics, for, by then, maybe $500. But that's several years away yet, tho it's coming. OTOH, maybe I'll go netbook for my main system by then, as by then, what compares to today's netbooks should be quad-core, 4-8 gig RAM, terabyte SSD, on its own, which would be pretty much a side-grade, only by then in today's netbook size and cost. =:^) If it has a place for a nice big 2560x1600 monitor, with of course external keyboard and mouse for heavy @ home use, that'd just about do it. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
