Nvidia Card Recommendations?
Posts: 20
After playing with multiple Linux distros, I have been having some good fun with MEPIS and have been using it more and more lately. I have also come to realise that ATI 3D is not well supported and I had bit of work to get my AIW 9800 working with 3D rendering. It appears however that the ATI driver does not work well with Beryl, which I wanted to try. I would like to switch to an nvidia card to, hopefully, get better video suport and am looking for suggestions on what card (AGP type) seems to be the most compatible with MEPIS. I'm not doing any hard core gaming so a middle of the road card is fine. I don't mind doing a little work to get the 3D going, but simplicity is what I'm really after. Let me know what you think, thanks.
System Config (this is an old system)
AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz
384MB PC133 RAM
80GB HDD (40GB partiton for MEPIS)
Creative Live Sound card
ATI AIW 9800 AGP Video card
Dlink 503 NIC
The FX5200 would be a good
Posts: 110
The FX5200 would be a good card, it uses the new nVidia driver and can be bought here in the U.S. at Walmart for around $70 to $80.
Or less
Posts: 1109
The FX5200 would be a good card, it uses the new nVidia driver and can be bought here in the U.S. at Walmart for around $70 to $80.
Or, less at online vendors. Here are some examples:
Graphics Cards using Nvidia FX Series chipsets at newegg.com, sorted by price
Jim C.
Yup
Posts: 31
I also have a machine with an FX5200 and It works just fine I think I paid under 40.00 for it. I bought another card for a box i built for a friend wish I could remember what brand it was. It was a cheapy but performed extremely well.I will have to look around and see if I can find the box.
The 5200 would be the
Posts: 194
The 5200 would be the cheapest alternative for about 35.
For about 50 you would get either a 5500(much faster) or a 6200 with pixelshader 3.0 instead of 2.0, which you might or might not need in the future.
If you want to spend more, since the introduction of the 8 series prices of the 6600GT, which used to be a hot card, are coming done with some vendors to well below 100.
The 7600GS would be still above 100.
e-GeForce 7100 GS
Posts: 106
I have just started to use this Card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130070
in a Shuttle SK22G2 with an AMD 4600+ X2 64bit CPU and 1GB Mem
and so far it is working very well and is silent. I don't do any gaming so I don't know how it would fair under those conditions. I am using it with SimplyMEPIS 6.5 rc3 64 now and am also going to try it with 6.5 rc3 32 just to see if it will work.
Thanks guys
Posts: 20
I decided to try a BFG nvidia 6600 GT OC AGP card with two monitor outputs, I got a new larger hard drive and downloaded the latest 6.5/32 iso, so I'm gonna do a load from cold.
GeForce 6600 GT
Posts: 38
Warning, my old system has a GeForce 6600 GT and the MEPIS installer for nVidia driver does not work. No version of MEPIS successfully installed the official nVidia on my PC (ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe, AMD Athalon 2800+). See the MEPIS wiki for notes on installation, etc. The easiest way is to install the official nVidia driver from the nVidia web site, http://www.nvidia.com
Make sure you have completely uninstalled any nvidia-GLX drivers that MEPIS (or you) installed using apt-get, Synaptic, Kpackage, etc. before installing the official driver.
NOTE: If you your kernel changes (on purpose or not), you will also need to reinstall the nVidia driver, so keep it around (or download the latest at the time).
Thanks for the warning
Posts: 20
Thanks for the warning jpotelle, however, its a little too late. You don't happen to have step-by-step of how you got yours to work do you? I tried installing the official nvidia driver, but just get a blank screen and the video signal drops after I logging in. The card does work after a standard installation from the LiveCD (I cannot use the nvidia kernel though, just the standard one that is the first option on the list) but direct-rendering is obviously not enabled.
nv driver, dpkg-reconfigure, uninstall glx, install nvidia
Posts: 38
Using the nv driver, make sure your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file has good and complete settings for your monitor. If you're not sure, use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and let it rebuild xorg.conf (BACKUP FIRST). Then be sure no GLX thingie is installed (in Synpatic, search "glx", uninstall COMPLETELY). Then download and install the official nVidia driver and let it update the xorg.conf when it asks (BACKUP FIRST). That's it.
Thanks for your help
Posts: 20
Thanks for continuing to follow the thread, jpotelle. I finally got it to work with direct rendering enabled, and then did a complete reload to make sure it wasn't a fluke. I think there are multiple ways to get this going and I used a combination of tips from you and others in this MEPIS forum and elsewhere on the interweb. I'm going to post my procedure in a new post so someone having similar problems can find it easier.
Link to your post
Posts: 38
Please post a link to your new post in this thread... Thanks!
Link to BFG nvidia 6600 GT OC AGP setup
Posts: 20
Here is a link to the steps I used to set up my new BFG nvidia 6600 GT OC AGP video card
Good Choice
Posts: 690
I left out the most important detail:MEPIS version - 6.5 RC3
The FX5200 works with hardware acceleration (nvidia-driver) in all Mepis versions, including all the betas/RC's. I have been using it for 2 years now on my desktop system.
Later edit:
Oops.....
Apparently a bit too late. You already bought the 6600
Regards, Ko
Ko Bros
Nvidia Card Recommendations?
Posts: 20
I left out the most important detail:
MEPIS version - 6.5 RC3