video card for new computer

[Stuart McGraw]

On 12/17/2017 05:45 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 14 December 2017 at 09:05, Stuart McGraw <smcg4191 at I > wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I am looking at buying a replacement for my 10-year old desktop
>> computer.  In the past I have had machines with integrated Intel
>> graphics and never had any problems.  The new machine I am thinking
>> of (HP Z440 workstation) seems to offer only a separate video
>> card, either Nvidia or AMD Firepro as options.
> 
> Have you seen these?
> 
> https://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/c/702/Xeon-Processors/
> 
> A few years old models, but super high-end at their time and still
> very credible PCs today.
> 
> I don't know where in the world you are, but you might be able to find
> a local vendor of such clearance stock. Myself, I run a Thinkpad X220
> bought from this company & shipped to the Czech Republic, last
> January. It's lovely, fast, very stable, and because it's a few years
> old, all the hardware works flawlessly with Ubuntu.

I'm in the US and that is exactly what I planned to do.  HP has has 
a web site on which they sell refurbished machines at a discount.
I bought my last PC there (a DC5800 desktop with Core Duo E8400 cpu) 
and was quite happy with it.  I have always liked HP hardware.  The 
machines there seem somewhat newer than those at morgancomputers 
(eg Z440 vs Z400) and the prices correspondingly higher but a somewhat 
newer machine is fine by me since I seem to keep computers for ~8 
years (looking at my past history) so starting with something more 
than a very few years old may not be optimal.

However most of the workstation machines they sell have Xeon chips, 
some of which has integrated gpus and some not from what I read.  
So if I go that route I will need to figure out which ones do.  And
nearly all (being workstations) come with a video card which I'll be 
paying for whether I use it or not.

But at this point I'm also thinking about either buying the parts 
and putting something together myself (have never done that before 
but it doesn't sound terrifically hard, albeit with somewhat more risk
and effort) or buying something from a custom pc builder (ecollege.com 
looked reasonably priced, most of the others I seen so far were out of 
my price range and oriented towards hard-core gamers.)

To keep this vaguely Ubuntu related, I looked at some of the pc builders 
that advertise linux/Ubuntu systems but wasn't impressed: limited hw
choices, limited info about components, but mostly, other than being
tested with Ubuntu, there's not much benefit since I would probably 
reinstall the OS when I got it anyway, just to get things the way I 
want them.