[ltp] graphics board for docking station - recommendations?

[Carl Nygard]

On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 14:53, André Wyrwa wrote:
> Hei,
> 
> I'm going to buy a pci graphics card to put into the thinkpad dock ii
> and use for enabling multihead for my t23 under linux.
> 
> Since I can still use the internal adapter as well, it doesn't need to
> have dualhead support on it's own, but it would be a nice gift since
> then i could even use 3 displays.
> 
> So far I spotted three card types of interest:
> 
> 1. Matrox G400/450 PCI
> 2. ATI Radeon 7000/7500/8000
> 3. NVidia GeForce 3/4
> 
> Since I have a rotateable LCD display as external I'd like to have X
> screen rotation support and since there is no DRI support in the savage
> driver I'd also like to have that.
> 
> So the question is which chip is supported best. I heart good things of
> all of them. Nvidia seems to have the native driver advantage, but I
> don't like that it's binary only.
> 
> Radeon seems to be the one with the most rapid development (or is that
> impression outdated?). And the drivers man page at the xfree86 pages
> doesn't say anything about a rotate feature even though googling
> suggests that it's there.
> 
> And Matrox seems to be a little wonder thingie, but more expensive than
> the other two.
> 
> I'd be glad about some recommendations, experiences (good and bad ones).

My company has a customer running Matrox multi-head cards.  Linux
drivers are fine, although I don't know specifically about 3D hardware
accel.  DVI outputs aren't supported (or at least they were having
problems last I heard).

PCI bus is going to be slower that AGP, no doubt.  Doesn't matter so
much unless you're a gamer tho.

-- 
Carl Nygard <cjnygard@fast.net>