[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: [Video card recommendations

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 15:35 -0500, Jay Urish wrote:
> I am about to put together the workstation server from hell.
> I am looking for video card recommendations. My new mobo will have the 
> Pci-e or x-16 slot.

???  I assume you meant a PCI-Express (PCIe) 16 channel (x16) slot.  The
"or" kinda confused me there.

Also note that "x" is never used to shorthand it, because there is
another PCI standard called PCI-X.  It's completely different than PCIe
(and PCI-X is physically/electrically backward compatible with PCI, PCIe
is not, only logical).

> I want to run dual head CRT's (Dell/Sony p1110's).  Built in video capture
> would be awesome! If I can't get built in, suggestions for a well
> supported cap card would be welcome!

On Linux video capture gets interesting.  ATI's codecs are all
proprietary (haven't tried their closed source drivers).  nVidia's older
Video-In/Video-Out (VIVO) used to be standards based, and I see the new
GeForce 7800GT[X] models often have it.  But I don't know if it's a
standards-based solution.

I would just get an add-on card, possibly something that does hardware
MPEG-2 compression in real-time.  The Pinnacle Micro x50 series products
seem to be well supported (at least the 350, possibly the 250 and 150
too?).

> I will be running mandriva 10.1 official.
> Everything will be intel.

Ouch.

> I am going with the Dual core proc and mobo and 2gb of ram.

Double ouch.
I highly recommend if you go more than 1GB, you go Opteron.
Intel still has major performance limitations at 1GB (and especially
4GB).


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     b.j.smith at ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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