the best graphicscard for FreeBSD

[Michael L. Squires]

I've been experimenting with various cards, most cheap.  The monitors are 
HP P1110 21" surplus, very bright (too bright) and very sharp.  These are 
the PC version with VGA connectors, not the ones with BNC connectors.

I currently have a Matrox G450 in dual-head mode under 5.3-STABLE with 
Xorg, updated a couple of days ago from ports.  Xinerama is very 
nice; the only problem I have is that MS Windows XP appears to leave the 
card in a wierd state, and I have to power cycle the system sometimes 
before the second monitor works correctly.  This system is an old SM P6DGH 
dual PII/300 with an early AGP slot.

I am moving to a newer machine, SM P4DCE+ dual Xeon 1.8GHZ.  It came with 
a Radeon 7000 VE board which works fine with 5.3-STABLE/Xorg using the 
config written by Xorg.  With versions before 5.3 I had to add 
radeondrm support, not now.  Both agp/drm show on dmesg.  This card 
works very well at 1280x1024, using very small characters - combination is
as good as the 19" NEC plasma I have at work, except bigger (and hotter).
(The Dell at work has a dual-head nVidia 5200 board).

I bought a new nVida based FX5500 board to experiment.  Trouble.  The main 
problem is that the video amps don't have the bandwidth to show sharp 
characters on the screen at 1280x1024 at any refresh I've tried.  nVidia 
does have drivers for FreeBSD 5.21 and later, but I haven't tried them.
(I tried both FreeBSD with the "nv" driver and MS Windows XP using the MS 
certified nVidia FX5500 driver).

I suspect that name-brand nVida-based cards would be better (I can't even 
find a name on this one, other than "nVidia"), but my mind is already made 
up.

For the moment I'm sticking with ATI-made Radeon cards; my next one will 
probably be either an 8400 dual head or a 9200 dual head.  I just have to 
find a game player who wants an nVidia FX5500/256MB dual head card cheap.

Mike Squires