Silent inexpensive graphics cards

[David Fletcher]

On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 10:59 -0500, Rashkae wrote:

> The ATI works and plays nice very very well with Open Source Drivers.  
> However, the ATI binary drivers are very very crappy, and I say, best 
> avoided.  Unfortunately, this makes the answer to your question more 
> complex.
> 
> If you want a 3D desktop that works out of the box with good Video 
> support (ie, movies, and what not), Go with the ATI.  Personally, for 
> the cost effetiveness, I buy Mobo's with an ATI G chipset.  Works great, 
> either way.
> 
> On the other hand, if you want to experiment with gaming, either through 
> Wine or native linux games, and possibly high end 3D modeling (I've 
> never tested performance with Blender and open source drivers) then 
> Nividia is still the only good choice, with Binary drivers.  They 
> generally work and Nivdia supports them well, at least, for a while.  
> Older cards get the cold shoulder from Nvidia, and with no Open source 
> support, eventually become problematic.  (I have 2 notebooks, for 
> example, with 6100 mobile GPU's that I've had to retire since they just 
> don't work anymore with newer distros anymore)
> 
> 
> 

OK then, the new PC is built, alive and kicking with the ATI card.

When I first logged in with the administrator account, there was a
prompt to install what I think it called closed source drivers for the
graphics card. It was a little icon at the top right that was a picture
of a PCI card with a padlock on it. I ignored it while doing other
things and now it has gone away.

I guess from what you say above that it should now be properly
configured by the open source drivers and that I should continue to do
nothing with it?

It was nice to see that the audio system is reporting two output
channels, the analog outputs from the motherboard sockets plus a digital
output from the HDMI socket on the graphics card.

Dave