[PLUG] Choosing an nVidia card

Derek Loree drl at drloree.com
Fri Oct 21 05:33:18 UTC 2011


On Wed, 2011-10-19 at 13:55 -0700, Richard C. Steffens wrote:
> My desktop machine croaked on Sunday. On Tuesday I visited that fine 
> emporium of well priced, used equipment -- The Free Geek Thrift Store -- 
> and acquired a "new" machine. It has most of what I wanted, and I 
> upgraded most of the rest. The Sony VAIO box includes:
> 
> Intel D915GRO motherboard
> Pentium 4  3.00 GHz
> 4 GB RAM
> 500 GB SATA hard drive
> 
> Ubuntu 10.04 is up and running.
> 
> Unfortunately Free Geek didn't have any nVidia cards yesterday so I'm 
> now looking for that upgrade.
> 
> The motherboard includes an "Intel Graphic Media Accelerator 900, 224MB 
> Max. dynamically allocated shared video memory. It also has "One PCI 
> Express x16 slot" and "One PCI Express x 1 slot". My old machine had an 
> AGP slot into which my old nVidia card went.
> 
> I have not kept up with video card technology so I'm not sure on what to 
> focus as I look through the nVidia options. I'm guessing that PCI 
> Express x 16 is better than x 1. Beyond that the only other thing that 
> may be important is that I also got a ViewSonic VG2030wm monitor that 
> has both an analog input and a DVI-D input. From that I'm assuming that 
> I need to be looking at nVidia cards that are PCI Express x 16 and have 
> a DVI-D output.
> 
> Anything else that I need to know?

Not really, you could look for two DVI outs for a little more
flexability.
> 
> Second question: Is it possible to use both the on-board video and the 
> PCI Express at the same time (going to different monitors, of course)?

I can't vouch for that particular board, but I have gotten Intel
Motherboards to run both on-board and PCI-express video at the same
time.  With two on the PCI-express slot, you could do three at once.
> 
> Thanks for all advice, tips, pointers, etc.
> 
Good Luck,

Derek Loree




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