[PLUG] Low Power DVI video cards?

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 02:28:04PM -0800, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> Any suggestions for low power DVI video cards (with Linux drivers,
> of course)?

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 08:52:03PM -0800, Paul Mullen wrote:
> Between 'man radeon' and Wikipedia's "Radeon R200" entry, you ought to
> be able to pick a suitable older ATi-based card. The latest that is
> fully supported by the X.Org drivers (meaning 3-D and all that good
> stuff) is the 9200-something, IIRC. Newer cards are useable with
> binary ATi-supplied drivers (if you can sleep with yourself after
> stooping so low). Most cards in the Radeon 9xxx range can be purchased
> brand new for $20-40.

After much fretting and research, I finally cut the Gordian Knot by
going to the Free Geek store.  Rick poked around and found 3 DVI
cards, and I bought all three for $10 each.  One worked easily.

Currently installed in the system was a Matrox G400 dual head card,
2 VGA, of which I was using only one.  Rick sold me these three
cards:

1) A Matrox G400 dual head with a DVI riser board.  It booted the
text startup of Fedora 1, but it would not go into graphics mode.
redhat-config-xfree86 (I am using legacy Fedora Core 1) failed to
talk to it, and I gave up after futzing around with the Xconfig
for a while.  Rather than waste time, I instead decided to try:

2) A Matrox G550.  This configured into X, but would not properly
configure for 1400x1050 to match my screen;  instead it interpolated
to 1280x1024 (which looks awful).  Rather than waste time, I tried:

3) A Radeon 7000/VE RV100 card.  This configured properly, and now
I am looking at 1400x1050 LCD with DVI drive.  Looks wonderful.
Admittedly, the VGA was not too bad, but I plan to connect the VGA
off my new LCD to the VGA switch box and get rid of another monitor,
saving a few millisalmon per week of electrical energy.

So thanks for all the suggestions.  I have some spare DVI boards
now, perhaps I will eventually find a DVI KVM switch box and learn
how to make these other boards work with it, replacing all the
VGA boards on the current KVM. 

And the main shopping suggestion is that Free Geek has a mess of
inexpensive video boards.  Do your holiday shopping there!

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs