Re: Another "What Motherboard Should I Buy" question

I demand that Anton Ertl may or may not have written...

Darren Salt <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I demand that Anton Ertl may or may not have written...
Darren Salt <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
[snip; Radeon 9200, 9250 3D performance]
what tweaks? (Limitation: the display consists of two monitors, total
width 2304 pixels.)
In the Device section of the xorg.conf file:
Option "GARTSize" "16" #up to 64 on other systems
Hmm. How does this differ from the AGPSize option? Just an alias? (I have
that set to 128; memory says that the BIOS has the same setting, and the
card is claimed to have 128MB on-board.)

I have no idea. I have never heard of AGPSize, and neither option is
documented in radeon(4) or Xorg.conf(5).

It does seem to be recognised; and, indeed, X is using a 128MB aperture.

Option "ColorTiling" "on"
On by default, according to Xorg.0.log, but disabled due to the total
display width being greater than 2048 pixels.

Yes, some options are on by default. Actually only the following is
really needed:

Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
Enabled.

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
I remember EXA working well, then not working well after an upgrade
(unfortunately, I'm not certain exactly which upgrade, but I suspect
something in X.org 6.9->7.1). Which is unfortunate, because it made
xfwm4's compositing work well.

I just played around with various combinations of all these options, and
this combination turned out to be best for IIRC UT2004 performance.

Fair enough...

Option "AGPMode" "4"
Both board and card support 8x. Is there a good reason for selecting 4x
despite this?

8x made no difference in the benchmarks I ran (UT2004 and glxgears), and my
guess is that 4x is safer (although probably not significantly).

Right. That stays at 8x :-)

[snip]
OTOH, I'm considering a 9550; ideally, I'd find something a bit better,
but they seem rather thin on the ground :-\

The Radeon X850XT AGP is still available, and not too expensive (~EUR
120,-). Alternatively, a little less powerful and quite a bit
cheaper (and not much more expensive than a 9550): X800GTO (EUR 72,-).

That should be... about £50? Yet the cheapest that I can find is
significantly more expensive - £85 for a PCI-E version (no good to me), and
over £100 for AGP versions.

At those prices, they know where they can stick them...

If you go for the 9550, for some applications (like UT2004) you should
get a version with a 128-bit memory interface and 256MB RAM.

The wider bus is probably sufficient :-)

However, if EXA is fixed (hmm, X.org 7.2?), the 9200 which I'm using should
still do well enough for most things.

As for the next motherboard - ATM I'm leaning towards something with Intel
graphics hardware. But that's not likely to happen until the current one
fails (which, hopefully, won't be for at least two or three years).

--
| Darren Salt | linux or ds at | nr. Ashington, | Toon
| RISC OS, Linux | youmustbejoking,demon,co,uk | Northumberland | Army
| + Output less CO2 => avoid boiling weather. TIME IS RUNNING OUT *FAST*.

Dawn alrea<snore>...
.

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