AGP, fanless, fast, w/ Gentoo/OpenGL support - wanted

wildhorse

I am looking for a good graphics adapter which is also supported by Gentoo/Linux and OpenGL.

CPU: Intel Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-8IHXP
RAM: 768 MB Rambus (PC-1066)
Bus: AGP 4x

Right now I have a cheap nVidia Vanta installed. Performance is poor.

For another machine with almost the same configuration, I bought an nVidia 7800GS (AGP) card and it really revived the machine That machine runs the other operating system at home and is used to play games. The only thing that I find troublesome is the card's fan.

Is there any fanless alternative which is almost as fast as the 7800GS (I know there are better ones for PCIe). The best I could find so far is an nVdia 7600, but I am not sure how close the 7600 gets to the 7800. It does not have to be an nVidia card. Any suggestion?

How is the Linux/OpenGL support for the nVidia 7800GS (AGP) ? If I find nothing fanless (for AGP 4x) that gets close to the 7800, then I may go this road.

Mad Merlin · Veteran Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 1155

I'm posting from a passively cooled PCIe 7950 GT, and to be honest, it's hard to find passively cooled graphics cards that aren't budget (ie, sucky) cards. Throwing in the AGP requirement, of course, drastically thins out your options as well, as I'm sure you know already.

On the plus side, pretty much any Nvidia card should be good as far as drivers go. Also, the 7600 GT and the 7800 GS are fairly close on performance. Anything under a 7600 in the 7x00 range should be considered a budget card.

Edit: Tom's hardware has some good VGA charts to give you an idea of relative card performance... I'd link you to the result set that I was looking at, but that feature apparently doesn't work, so here's a screenshot instead: http://otc.dyndns.org/gf7series.png
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wildhorse · Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 2:16 am Post subject:

Mad Merlin, the chart on Tom's Hardware is good as a reference, thanks! Too bad that the keywords AGP and fanless are not listed there. But I did notice the ratio between the lower end and the top. Shocking.

While searching a bit more, I found the Gainward Bliss 7800GS+ (this is actually a 7900 with PCIe-AGP bridge on the card). This one has a fan, but is suppose to be quiet (BTW the fan in my 7800GS is too loud). Well, it got also quiet around this card because it seems they had a DOA rate of more than 50%.

Apparently there was a problem related to AGP 8x, which reportedly could be addressed by switching to AGP 4x (my mobo comes with AGP 4x only). The card was available 2 years ago, but it seems the card disappeared from the market (found one in the UK though). Perhaps someone knows where to find one in the US.

I would also consider a combination of a stock AGP card with passive cooler from a third party like Zalman. Any suggestion?

ATI's web site merged with AMD and I find it really hard to get any useful information from there. Fanless is even not a selection criteria on their web site.

Although I could not find any fanless 7600GT or 7800GT/GS (w/ AGP) yet, I did find the Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS (GV-N76G256D-RH). Anybody using this card with Gentoo and OpenGL, or a similar card (7600GS)?

Evincar · Apprentice Joined: 13 Feb 2007 Posts: 217 Location: Madrid

Mmmm, I guess it all depends on the use you want to give it, just compiz et al, 3D rendering for some chemical simulation program, games...

I have tried a 7600GT in an AGP 8x, and at least in compiz, the performance is drop dead awesome. For some reason I can't get Fast AGP Writing enabled, but even then, all the effects except minimize are butter smooth. I hope to find some time to play games this weekend, I will tell you the results.

Anyway, keep in mind that the 7600GT is a good 50% faster than the 7600GS, I guess due to thermal restrictions.
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Monkeh · Veteran Joined: 06 Aug 2005 Posts: 1656 Location: England

I used a PCI-E 7600GS in my workstation up until recently, 2D performance was fine. 3D performance was also workable (briefly tried Quake Wars on it).

If you can't find a suitable passively cooled card, buy one with a fan and fit a different heatsink. There are many options. Unfortunately they don't all fit AGP cards properly.