[Wylug-discuss] New motherboard and processor - recommendations?

[Paul Brook]

> Any recommendations or ones to avoid like the plague?

The only current graphics chipsets with usable 3D open source drivers are 
Intel onboard chipsets. There are comparatively slow, but should still be 
more than sufficient for fancy beryl eye candy.

Antique ATI r200/300/400 (like your Radeon 9100) also have functional (but 
fairly slow) open source drivers, though these tend to be AGP so aren't 
usable on new systems.  The future for ATI cards is somewhat of an open 
question at this point. They say they're going to release docs for r500 
(X1000) and r600 (Radeon HD). However only the 2D bits have been released so 
far. Even if the remaining docs were released today it'd probably take a few 
months before they resulted in useful drivers.

There are functional open source 2D drivers for both ATI and nVidia cards.
These are sufficient for desktop use, watching DVDs, etc.  You just don't get 
things like the spinny cube.

nVidia don't have open source 3D drivers, and AFAIK are unlikely to do so in 
the forseeable future. This means you're stuck with the binary drivers. If 
you're willing to sell your soul to the devil these can work reasonably well, 
with functionality and performance that can approach that of the windows 
drivers. However in addition to the philosophical arguments there are several 
practical drawbacks: They *will* break when new kernels and Xorg are 
introduced, it often takes a significant amount of time (months) for nVidia 
to fix them. Similarly if you're using an out of the ordinary setup (e.g. 
Xen) expect problems, if it works at all. I've experienced several machines 
where they caused frequent crashes of lockups. On some machines crippling the 
AGP settings worked around the problems, on others I never got them to work 
reliably. Long term support is also an issue as nVidia drop support for older 
cards after a few years. e.g. the current drivers don't support GeForce4 or 
earlier cards. It can also take a while for new cards/features to be 
supported. Because you're dealing with binary drivers you're entirely at the 
mercy of nVidia, noone else has a hope in hell of fixing any of these 
problems. </rant>

At this point, unless you're driving an extremely large (30") monitor and need 
dual-link DVI, is to go for an integrated Intel chipset. With most boards 
this still leaves the door open for a PCIe card if/when you need to power and 
the drivers for those get sorted out.

Paul