[HLUG] OTish: Graphics Cards/Xorg usage/GPU upgrade

[Ralph Jones]

Lo all, 

Just a quick question as regards graphics cards. I've just been browsing
eBay to see what's available second-hand, and is it me, or are 128/256Mb
AGP cards ridiculously cheap? Has everybody (who's anybody) now moved
onto PCI-E cards?

And more importantly, how 'backward-compatible' are AGP cards as regards
speed? Will a 8x card still work in a mobo that only supports 1x/2x/4x
cards? (albeit running at 4x max speed).

The reason I ask, and and nicely brings this missive back on topic, is
X.org.

Most certainly since upgrading to Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy?) from the
previous incarnation, I've found Xorg hogging the CPU (70-90%), as well
as a majority of my RAM (20-30%), when running 2-3 sessions of Firefox +
Evolution + Azureus/Frostwire + Icepodder. Doing a bit of googling shows
me that a lot of people have registered this as a bug; some as an Ubuntu
bug, some as an X.org bug, and some as a Firefox bug. I just hope they
don't come up with three patches/upgrades, which conflict with each
other further.


So, I am faced with three options:

a) at the beginning of the 21st century to modify the way I use my
computer to suit hardware + software.

b) upgrade my hardware to suit the requirements of 21st century
computing.

c) downgrade my software to suit my late 20th century hardware (Athlon
XP1500/1048Mb RAM/32Mb ATi AGP card).


Option a) got kicked out in the first round, I haven't time to
reschedule my day to make time to suit.

Option c) is something I will be looking at further; I've just
downloaded Fluxbuntu to install on a rainy day and will be looking at
DSL and Puppy as well. I am also looking into ditching FF and Evolution
in favour of Kazekhase and Claws.

Option b) is where I'd appreciate your ha'penny's worth. Will a
seemingly cheap upgrade of my AGP graphics card take some of the strain
off my CPU and RAM? I could also stick another 1Gb of RAM in there, but
at the moment graphics cards seem to be dirt-cheaper than RAM.

And it occurs to me that perhaps I should ditch X.org and install the
current version version of XFree86? How easy/difficult would that be?
Bearing in mind that I've never 'rolled' my own kernel.

Your thoughts on this appreciated. And apologies for the missive getting
out of hand - I only mail once a year, so tend to use my quota up in one
go!

Regards
Ralph