[ltp] How do you like your W500 or W700?

[Micha Feigin]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:30:03 +0100
Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org> wrote:

> On lun, 2009-02-09 at 21:59 -0800, Bill Wohler wrote:
> > 
> > My desktop at work has an nVidia card. I was able to install and
> > configure the Debian nVidia packages easily, and the accelerated
> > graphics work fine! And it works with two monitors. And I can use a
> > projector. None of this works on my T40p.
> 
> Avoid nvidia at all cost.

My only problem with nvidia is that it hangs for about a minute on resume.
There are also some problems with constantly rotating the screen with xfwm (in
4.4 compositing had to be disabled/enabled, in 4.6 it doesn't always maximize
windows correctly).
3D works great, compositing works without a hitch, movies play, even several at
a time.
I do cuda development and that works great also (although doing math on your
primary display can have it's side effects).

This is on a t61 with nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M laptop and a quadcore
with geforce 8600 in another. The latest binary driver from nvidia (180.22 on
one machine and 180.25 on another), though not the one in the debian
repository. I use xrandr for rotating the screen and nvidia-settings for
controlling the external display. No issues with an external flat panel and
external projector. Haven't tried multiple desktops for presentation. Had some
problems with full screen in such scenarios (window maximized to cover both
desktop instead of current one), didn't have to much time to play with it
though.

Power control also seems to be ok, although a discrete graphics card is more
power hungry than integrated graphics (I can get the machine to around 16w-17w
with some work and while not abusing it)


> 
> > I therefore want to avoid the ATI trap on my next ThinkPad.
> 
> Avoid fglrx driver (binary driver). radeon/radeonhd work fine
> 
> If you want the best support, use intel graphics. It works pretty fine
> and is even powerful enough for ~some~ 3D stuff. If you badly need 3D
> stuff, then: radeon/radeonhd > nvidia > fglrx
> 
> nouveau is not really usable at the moment and nvidia driver is known to
> do bad stuff with some compositing (xfwm compositer for example) and you
> can't debug anything, as always with crappy binary stuff.
> 
> Cheers,