hardware upgrade needed ...

[teratux]

Hi .. recently my x1400 card broke. I need to get a new card for my Inspiron 6400 and have the following options provided by the manufacturer:

ATI x1300
ATI x1400
NVIDIA Geforce Go 7300

I have some questions still as to what the best choice will be. I noticed in many of the forums that the dates on these debates goes back to the year 2006, 2007. I saw in one that the x1600 has the same form factor and bus as the previous x1300 and x1400 and I was wondering if that's a choice to consider for my laptop. I would also like to know if it isn't, if the NVIDIA G Go 7300 is more powerful or not than the x1400 and how is the support on Linux for these two candidates.

Thanks ...

[droidhacker]

Hi .. recently my x1400 card broke. I need to get a new card for my Inspiron 6400 and have the following options provided by the manufacturer:

ATI x1300
ATI x1400
NVIDIA Geforce Go 7300

I have some questions still as to what the best choice will be. I noticed in many of the forums that the dates on these debates goes back to the year 2006, 2007. I saw in one that the x1600 has the same form factor and bus as the previous x1300 and x1400 and I was wondering if that's a choice to consider for my laptop. I would also like to know if it isn't, if the NVIDIA G Go 7300 is more powerful or not than the x1400 and how is the support on Linux for these two candidates.

Thanks ...

That's a laptop... don't tell me it has a replaceable graphics card...???

Obviously given the choices you present, the x1400 is the way to go. Nvidia is a nightmare.

[droidhacker]

Note regarding support: the AMD cards (x1?00) are properly supported by stable and fairly mature open source drivers. The nvidia card is supported by a freakishly unreliable hacker driver called "nouveau", or by nvidia's unreliable binary blob driver. Neither nvidia solution is acceptable.

I couldn't tell you if the x1600 would fit/work in that unit.

To be honest with you though, I wouldn't worry too much about performance. Not like that machine is anywhere near to being even a half-decent performer to begin with....

[movieman]

ATI appear to have abandoned my X1250 integrated chip to the point where I'm about to buy a cheap Nvidia card to stick in the computer (the last driver ATI released which supports that card no longer works without making manual changes to their code), so I'd suggest Nvidia if you're not using the latest and greatest hardware... which none of those are.

[bridgman]

movieman, are you running the latest open source drivers (including r300g driver) on your hardware ? If not you should give them a try.

[movieman]

movieman, are you running the latest open source drivers (including r300g driver) on your hardware ? If not you should give them a try.

It's a CentOS system, so I suspect the drivers are pretty old. I'm trying to remember whether the radeon driver worked at all or whether I had to use vesa, Whichever it was, the performance wasn't good (not that I need much, but noticeable slower) and it didn't support the 1920x1080 monitor resolution.

I guess when CentOS 6 comes out in a month or two it may have a better version of the open source driver.

[bridgman]

Yeah, going to version 6 should get you a lot closer anyways. You're going to want KMS and DRI2 in order to run the r300g driver.

[droidhacker]

The open source driver with centos5 definitely won't be giving you much happiness. Its basically based on 2007 with a bunch of patches thrown in -- just after evil ati got swallowed up by the good guys. Much better stuff came later.

[teratux]

hardware upgrade ...

Note regarding support: the AMD cards (x1?00) are properly supported by stable and fairly mature open source drivers. The nvidia card is supported by a freakishly unreliable hacker driver called "nouveau", or by nvidia's unreliable binary blob driver. Neither nvidia solution is acceptable.

I couldn't tell you if the x1600 would fit/work in that unit.

To be honest with you though, I wouldn't worry too much about performance. Not like that machine is anywhere near to being even a half-decent performer to begin with....

Ok thanks for the reply, and to the others on the thread. I'm guessing ATI is the way to go for this pc. I still need some more info though as to whether the x1600 will be compatible on the Inspiron 6400 and how good Linux support there is to it ...

Thanks again !!!

[droidhacker]

Ok thanks for the reply, and to the others on the thread. I'm guessing ATI is the way to go for this pc. I still need some more info though as to whether the x1600 will be compatible on the Inspiron 6400 and how good Linux support there is to it ...

Thanks again !!!

I doubt that anybody here would be able to tell you if the x1600 will work on that laptop. That laptop has a very unusual configuration, no doubt proprietary, which means that you'll need to hear from someone who has actually tried. Possibly someone at dell might know.

Regarding the open source driver support for x1600... yes. Same as the x1300 and x1400. They're all R500's running on the same R500 driver.

Here's a little more info about the differences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R520 -- from what I see, the difference between the x1300 and x1400 is the clock speed. The x1600 *probably* won't be noticeably faster than the x1400, at least not under the kind of load you are likely going to be sending it. I honestly wouldn't worry too much about it and just grab the x1300 or x1400.