Where can I get older PCI video cards in the GTA?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 05:23:25PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   First a bit of background.  After the revelation that the lead
> developers for udev want to require that /usr be on the same partition
> as / (or else use /initramfs) I looked for a way to dump udev entirely.
> Since I didn't know whether it would even boot up, I tested on an older
> Dell.  Following instructions I picked up on the Gentoo Developers'
> list. I replaced udev with busybox's mdev under Gentoo, and it works
> just fine so far.  I want to use it as my everyday machine for extended
> testing.  The only problem is that I've subscribed to NHL GameCenter
> Live and the onboard GPU (82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics
> Controller) in this older Dell is not powerful enough to keep up with
> hockey in fullscreen mode.  On my newer i3 machine, I've got a choice
> between 3 megabits and "adaptive" on the NHL control panel.  On the
> older machine, that choice is greyed out, and the picture will often
> stutter in fullscreen mode.
> 
>   I said to myself "No problem, I've got a PCI video card kicking
> around.  I'll stick it in and I'm set".  Unfortunately, PCI slots seem
> to have changed over the years, and the video card doesn't fit into the
> slots on the older Dell.  I don't know the names of the specs, but as
> they say "a picture is worth a thousand words".  First a picture of the
> slots in the older Dell...
> http://clients.teksavvy.com/~walterdnes/misc/slots.jpg

Can't be that old.  That's a PCIe x16 slot.  Any modern video card will fit.

The other short black slot is a PCIe x1 slot.  Good for sata controllers, USB3 cards, firewire, network cards, etc.

The white slots are old PCI slots.  Forget those for graphics.

The one type you don't have, but which an old video card might use is AGP.
Those are usually brown.

> Next is a snap of an older firewire card (left) which fits the slot, and
> the spare video card (right) which does not fit...
> http://clients.teksavvy.com/~walterdnes/misc/cards.jpg
> 
>   Where can I get a PCI video card that fits into the PCI slots on the
> old Dell?  And I'd obviously prefer something with opensource drivers
> for linux.  It would be a shame to throw out an otherwise perfectly good
> machine.

So that's a PCI firewire card, and an AGP video card.

So simple, go buy a new PCIe x16 video card.  Easy.

Your video card is too old, or the machine is too new.  Nice problem
to have.  The other way around would be much harder.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists