[Gllug] OT hardware recommendations

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 09:58, Tethys wrote:
> Mike Brodbelt writes:

> Are you saying specifically to go for a FireGL or similar card? Or just
> any card with 3D acceleration?

No, just any card with 3D acceleration. I'd imagine a FireGL is overkill
unless his Dad is doing really high end stuff. I tend to assume that the
people who need FireGL level cards know they need them...

> >No, and in general, U320 won't be any faster than U160 for a single
> >disk. 
> 
> Yes, but since the system is going to be used for video editing, it will
> benefit from RAID anyway, rather than just a single drive. I'd always
> say go for SCSI over IDE, but IDE RAID configurations are coming up
> pretty cheap these days, so if cost's a factor, it might be worth
> looking into.

RAID is definitely a good idea. Like you, I always go SCSI in
preference, but a lot of my reasoning is a belief that its just better
quality hardware, and more reliable.

> Tekram controllers are pretty good, but check in advance which ones
> have native kernel support. Although mine (a DC-395X) is supported,
> the driver isn't in the stock kernels, so I have to apply a patch
> from external sources to get it to work.

They seem to be quite co-operative though, from what I've heard.
Admittedly, having to patch the kernel to get your hardware running is a
bit of a pain.

> Actually, Rv250 cards have full hardware accelleration under Linux.
> Not only have ATI have their own closed source driver, but unlike
> NVIDIA, they've released full programming information to XFree86,
> so an open source driver is available as of XFree86-4.3.0 (released
> a couple of weeks ago).

Cool, that's great to know. The DRI website obviously isn't up to date
then. Any arrival date on full support for the Rv300 based cards?


Mike.


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