Help me pick a replacement graphics card?

[Martin Tournoij]

On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 09:56:42PM -0600, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> My aging GeForce MX 400 is dying and I want to replace it with something a bit 
> more modern.  My desktop is running FreeBSD 6.2 on a Asus A7V (Via chipset) 
> motherboard with a 1.4GHz Athlon.  This is more of a hardward question than 
> software, although pointers to any FreeBSD-specific driver gotchas would be 
> appreciated.
> 
> Basically, I want to run a few OpenGL apps (particular the "Second Life" 
> client, which works perfectly under Linux emulation), so I pretty much have 
> to use the "nvidia" driver and not the open "NV" driver.  The old card's 
> performance was fine for my purposes, so almost much anything at all newer 
> should be OK.  Therefore, I don't want to spend a lot of money on this.  
> However, I don't want to buy a card so old that NVidia will drop support for 
> it in the next driver upgrade, as they did with this current card.
> 
> My motherboard has an AGP 4x slot that the "nvidia" driver wants to run in 2x 
> mode because it doesn't like the Via chipset.  Now, it seems like there are 
> precious few AGP 4x cards available these days; most look like 8x.  Are those 
> backward compatible all the way to 2x?  Google returns plenty of 
> authoritative-sounding hits on both sides.
> 
> Is there anything else I should be looking for?  Any specific models you might 
> recommend?
> -- 
> Kirk Strauser

It doesn't matter if you mainboard is 4X AGP and your card is 8X AGP,
it's backward compatible.

The cheapest card available in most stores today is the geforce
FX5200 (128MB), so, any new card you buy today will do fine.

This card will do fine for your current applications, but you may want
to buy a better, more expensive one, because hardware requirements go
up all the time (especially for games).
It all depends on your budget...