Mike Clarke wrote:
After running a 90 hour portupgrade job on my current Duron 1600 based system
I've persuaded myself that a hardware upgrade is due.
I'm contemplating building a system around an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ CPU. I'm not
into games and overclocking so a relatively low end motherboard with
integrated graphics should suffice. I've been looking at a few specs, many of
them use Nvidia chipsets and I understand that there isn't a Nvidia graphics
driver for FreeBSD on the AMD64 platform.
If I choose a Nvidia based motherboard would I have to install the i386
version of FreeBSD if I wanted to use the onboard graphics, in which case to
what extent would the overall performance suffer?
My graphics needs are fairly modest, so long as I can use the Gimp to edit
some photos I'm OK, but playing the occasional DVD fairly smoothly would be a
bonus but not essential. Is there any alternative graphics driver which would
meet my needs?
... or should I just keep away from Nvidia and concentrate on something with
ATI graphics?
I had a machine with integrated NVidia graphics running FreeBSD/Amd64
for a few weeks.
It was an Athlon X2 4600+ and the onboard graphics was GeForce 7100.
Usually the integrated graphics come from the lower-spec graphic
chipsets and are well supported by the open source "nv" driver. As long
as you don't need fancy 3D effects, the combination works perfectly and
is absolutely suitable for a desktop. DVDs were no problem, and the
whole feeling was the machine was "flying". (Pitty I had to part with it...)
There are lots and lots of cheap 'n' cheerful micro-atx boards to choose
from.
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