Unsupported Video Card

[DuoMaxwell]

why waste time one on used card that may not work when a 7300GT will beat that 5200 quite throughly for $55? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130026 You get all the hardware features of the newer card as well, the only thing to be careful of with such low end cards is turbo cache, which have part of the quoted memory as real onboard graphics ram withthe rest being ram borrowed from the system, something you're trying to avoid. Some are so bad they only have 64-128Mb of actual graphics memory on card the rest being as much as 512 mb quoted, all of that form your system's ram, slowing everything down nearly as bad as an intergrated GPU. for the low end look at the 7300GT and higher ranged cards in the 7x00 series or for more future proofing for future OpenGL 3.0 support next year then get something from the 8x00 range starting at the 8500GT and going up from there.

A good balance of features, price, preformance and extras for a mid to low high end card for resolutions not exceeding 1280x1024 would be this 8600GTS http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127284

A little more on the exspensive side yes, but the benches say that even tho it's got a bottle neck with its 128 bit memory bus that it's a good competitor to the next step up, the 8800GTS 320Mb edition, which while more exspensive and is capable of handleing things better at resolutions up to 1600x1200 lacks the support for nvidia's pure video HD, which while only currently supported by vista theres alays a chance that someone will getit working on linux. What it does is offloads all video procesing to the graphics card, so all mpeg videos, no matter what resolution are handled by the gpu while your CPU is freed up to do other things. Keeping CPU utilization capped down to around 14% while playing a video thats in h.264 codec at 1920x1080@60FPS, something the CPU usually has to do most of the processing for.

Also don't wory about covering up that PCIe 1x slot with a dual slot GPU cooler, almost nothing uses it, you can add the odd part here or there but it's pretty much useless.

Check here for some cpmparasins

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2006.html thats the old 2k6 charts, this is the 2k7 charts http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html The Doom 3 is a native linux game, you can bench it yourself with the demo and see what you get compared to the 7300GT, the 8600GTS was released after the charts where made so look between the stats of the 8800GTS 320 and the stats pulled by the 7900GT. Also games like Half Life are supported under cedega so those benches may be meaningful to you as well.

Yes, the mid and low end 8x00 series cards sucked with the early drivers, but benches I've seen with current drivers shows that no, the 8600GTS isn't something between the old 7600GT and the 7900GS, that it smokes them both in a head to head comparasin with current drivers.

[WesMatte]

I tried to run a integrated Geforce 6150(takes 64mb of my ram, Nvidia9755 driver) with 2,2ghz AMD64 cpu, 1gigs of ddr-ram(dual channel). This system runs WoW(that other popular MMORPG ) very well! 30fps+ at least(in Ubuntu Linux+Wine).. Then i installed Regnum on the same system(still in Ubuntu Linux) and did not get as good performance. I had to reduce everything to to low or off to get it playable(18-23 outside town, around 8-13 fps inside towns dependning what's on or off in options).. I tought Regnum was a hardware "friendly" game that didn't demanded newest hardware to get good performance..

[DuoMaxwell]

Yes, it seems that they still have allot of work ahead of them in optimizing the graphics system, NGD unlike Blizzard doesn't have a few hundred million to toss around to test on every videocard and build optimizations for each core model.