[SWLUG] Compatability questions

[Steve Hill]

On Sun, 14 Dec 2008, Rich Colquhoun wrote:

> A far as graphics cards are concerned you're best off going with NVIDIA
> or ATI because they supply Linux specific drivers.

I would avoid nVidia - whilst they do supply binary drivers for Linux, 
they are a pain in the arse (they are buggy, power management is flakey as 
hell, nVidia's support often lags behind anyone else's by many months so 
you can often kiss goodbye to running the latest distro, and no one in 
their right mind will debug any kernel problems if you have the nVidia 
module loaded).

I have no personal experience of ATI, but the above tends to apply to most 
binary-only drivers.

For most peoplem, there's not a lot of point in getting nVidia or ATI 
these days since Intel GPUs are supported out of the box by any modern 
distro without having to resort to binary drivers.  Also has the advantage 
that Intel can't suddenly drop all support for your hardware because they 
think it's time for you to upgrade.  The sticking point is that if you 
want an Intel GPU, you're going to need an Intel CPU too because (as far 
as I know) Intel only do integrated graphics - no separate PCI-E cards.

> If you're thinking of getting a card with built in
> graphics then make sure its built into the AGP or PCI-express because if
> it's just standard PCI then it doesn't matter how good the card is...

I can't believe anyone puts built-in graphics hardware on the PCI bus - 
I've certainly not seen that done since the introduction of AGP.  And now, 
AGP is rare - it'll be on a PCI-E bus instead.

> As for the motherboard, I think mine is a gigabyte one and I've never had
> any trouble with compatibiliy.

I've had a lot of trouble with gigabyte boards so I wouldn't recommend 
them myself, but this may just be a bad personal experience:

- The Gigabyte TX board I got in 1996/7 was fantastic
- The Gigabyte socket A board I got in 2002 had more ACPI problems than 
you could shake a stick at.  No chance of getting nice stuff like 
temperature readings (either through ACPI or lm_sensors) either.  The 
board blew up in a (literal) cloud of smoke a couple of years later when 
most of the capacitors on the board bubbled up

- The Gigabyte socket A board I got in 2003 has broken ACPI - trying to 
suspend the machine to RAM results in the kernel getting everything ready 
to suspend, and then the machine cuts the power to the whole motherboard (RAM 
and all) - not a lot of use.  Also has the slowest POST I've seen on a 
desktop machine - takes *30 seconds* to POST with most of the onboard 
hardware turned off and all the "fast POST" bios options turned on.  This 
doesn't have any exotic hardware that you'd expect to take a while to 
initialise, such as SCSI.

- The Gigabyte socket A board I got around 2005 to replace the one that 
went up in smoke also has more ACPI problems than you can shake a stick 
at, and they didn't bother to drill all of the heatsink mounting holes 
through the board, so I had to make some (rather dodgy) modifications to 
my CPU heatsink.

So my conclusion is that modern Gigabyte boards are crap - I won't be 
getting another.

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence