all this talk about new rigs and such reminds me that i need to figure out how to fix my father's system... it has an ati radeon in it that was giving fits with winwhatever so we switched him to linux (kubuntu) and we're still having problems with the video drivers there... i've been out of the biz for too long and haven't kept up with all the hardware stuff... he just needs a fairly
basic video card with opengl capabilities... i'll have to dig to find out what card and motherboard he has right now, though... i know that none of my existing video cards will work in his system...

so, with all that said, can you give me a few recommendations, please?

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so, with all that said, can you give me a few recommendations, please?

NewEgg.com is a *great* place to search for video cards because of their excellent video card search parameters. I recommend finding out what the best slot is available on the motherboard (or what he has now), then go to NewEgg and filter by things like:

1. Motherboard slot
2. Nvidia (better driver compatibility than ATI/AMD)
3. Highest DirectX version
4. Sort by lowest price first

You can even drill down into the types of output ports, memory type, customer ratings, price ranges, etc. I bet you can get a basic video card from $10-50 that will cover the basics.

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all this talk about new rigs and such reminds me that i need to figure out how to fix my father's system... it has an ati radeon in it that was giving fits with winwhatever so we switched him to linux (kubuntu) and we're still having problems with the video drivers there... i've been out of the biz
for too long and haven't kept up with all the hardware stuff... he just needs a fairly basic video card with opengl capabilities... i'll have to
dig to find out what card and motherboard he has right now, though... i
know that none of my existing video cards will work in his system...

I've always heard that Nvidia's Linux drivers are better than ATI's drivers.
I had an ATI card at one point (around 2006) and I found that installing the driver required slightly more work than Nvidia, but I think the only major thing was that ATI's driver required rebooting the machine whereas Nvidia's drivers didn't. I'm not sure of the state of Nvidia vs. ATI/AMD's drivers in Linux now though.

Nightfox

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On 08/28/14, wkitty42 said the following...

capabilities... i'll have to dig to find out what card and motherboard
he has right now, though... i know that none of my existing video cards

just to update this...

ASUS P5QL Pro motherboard with a ATI Radeon HD 4350 video card...

someone asked about the slot the card is in... that's the PCIExpress16 slot...

thanks for the previous suggestions... i'm looking now to try to at least
match the vid capabilities if not exceed them while trying to keep the cost down...

while the machine can dual boot to vista64 we're moving away from it to linux so linux drivers are an important aspect... he got tired of the thing locking up and/or rebooting so we went to linux at least 6 months to a year ago and we're seeing similar problems which all seem to be going back to the damned video card and drivers on both OSes :(

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Re: Re: video cards
By: wkitty42 to All on Tue Sep 02 2014 03:20 pm

just to update this...

ASUS P5QL Pro motherboard with a ATI Radeon HD 4350 video card...

Well I enjoy Tom's Hardware review of the best bang for your buck reviews of all PC components. Since you have a PCIe slot you can get any card and it should fit the bill. With an old system keep in mind some video cards need a power connector. If your power supply is old/cheap you may need to update it, but if you go for an entry level card they usually run fine with whatever.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html

I would stick to nVidia/Geforce, I've heard their Linux drivers are better, but ATi's should work as well.

The GeForce GTX 750 Ti is listed as the fastest card that does not require a power input. ($150), the first one they list is the GeForce GT 730 64-bit GDDR5 for $68.50. That's as of 9/2014. Either one should work, and either card should perform above the 4350.

If you spend more on the card you could easily take the card to a new system when you decide to upgrade. You might keep that in mind if you think you might update other components in the near future.

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