Re: Cheap PCI graphic cards for GNOME Shell

[Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com>]

On Mon, 2011-06-13 at 13:57 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote:
> > These days it may be cheaper to find a used
> > machine that can do PCI/E or AGP, than to find a straight PCI video
> > card that is fast enough.
> 
> Except that it hurts my environmentally-conscious self to "throw away"
> those desktop machines that are in working order, just lacking a good
> video card.
> 
> eBay listings for PCI video cards are generally littered with
> - ATI Radeon 9200/9250 (which are R200 if I recall correctly)
> - nVIDIA MX4000 (of the NV10 family; too old?)
> - nVIDIA FX5200/FX5500 (of the NV30 family)
> 
> Usually priced at 30$ or so. Perhaps the NV30 cards (such as the geforce
> FX 5200 and 5500) would be the only viable option? (if the hardware is
> fast enough)

Of those three, yes, I'd say the FX5xxx would be the best bet.

Looking at my usual reseller -
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?minorcatid=108&subminorcatid=50 - I
see a GeForce 6200 is the #1 result, which is certainly new enough to be
Shell-capable (though I can't testify to whether that specific card does
in fact work or if there's any kind of nouveau bug with it). I even see
that some crazy company made a PCI GeForce 8400GS; that's a pretty
recent generation.

The Radeons listed there other than the 9250 should also work.

Looking at NewEgg -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709%
20600007853&IsNodeId=1&name=PCI - I see a similar story; quite a lot of
cards that should work fine. The 6200s, 8400, X1550, 9400 GT (I have a
PCI-E version of that chip which works fine), HD 4350, FX 5200s, X1300,
HD 5450 would all look like reasonable bets. I didn't bother looking at
page 2 or 3.

As has been noted earlier on this list, any Intel 915 or later (though
you can't get these as discrete cards, so it's irrelevant to you), any
NVIDIA from GeForce onwards (though I'd probably look at GeForce 4 as a
baseline, just to be safe, I'm not sure anyone's really tested the older
ones...and GeForce 4 may be a slightly unsafe bet too) and any Radeon
from R300 onwards (so Radeon 9500 and later) should work.

It doesn't look like it should be too difficult to source a compatible
PCI adapter.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net