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Date:	Thu, 15 Dec 2005 14:28:13 PST8
From:	Colin Campbell <cmcampb@adelphia.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Graphics Card Questions

Content Type: text/plain

John A. Morrow, Jr. wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My family and I have moved, and when I reconnected my PC, it shows no
> video signal. I switched monitors with another in the house that is
> presently working on another PC, that one is also dark. The hard drive
> seems to be reading when I power up the machine in question, so I
> suspect the video card has taken a dive. I removed the card (a Matrox
> Millenium G400) and reseated it and still no signal. I have an old S3
> Virge in another machine that I'm not using which I can switch out for
> test purposes, but it may be time for either a new graphics card or a
> whole new PC.
>
> Looking at Outpost.com I see a multitude of cards available for a wide
> variety of prices. They have them with 32MB through 256 MB RAM. I was
> looking in the middle at 128MB cards. Being incurably cheap and having
> no need for high end graphics applications or the latest games, I'm
> considering cards in the $50.00 range. For example, Outpost has several
> 128 MB AGP cards with the GeForce MX4000 chip which look interesting.
> Also, I see that SNAP supports a long list of chips so I forsee no
> problem finding a match, but do folks have any specific recommendations
> or cards to stay away from?
>
> Also, as I said, it may be time for a new machine. I would probably buy
> on the low end, as the new ones are orders of magnitude above what I
> presently have, an AMD K6-3 450 mHz. Is there collective experience with
> the integrated video? Does it work with eCS 1.2?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> John Morrow
> Atascadero, California
>
John,
I bought a Dell Dimension 8400 at the very beginning of this year. I
installed eCS 1.2 on it, after buying a second SATA hard drive. (I was
loath to try to resize or completely blow away the WinXP Home which
occupied the entire 80GB hard drive.)

Naturally, 12 months later, this has gone from nearly top of the line to
practically obsolete. Dell's XPS line was and is their top model, but
now, Dimension 9150 seems to be "next", and 8400's are no longer offered.

At any rate, this machine came with an ATI Radeon X300 Series (128MB)
video card, and eCS and SNAP knew right off what to do with it. I'm
using a 19" flat panel display that was "free" with my system, at a 1280
x 1024 resolution and 16M colors.

I believe that the on board NIC would have worked, but I added an Intel
PRO/1000 card, and that works fine with a driver available from Intel.

I ordered a Sound Blaster Live card, but I couldn't get that to work, so
I finally unplugged that in favor of the on-board sound, and UniAud
works with that.

The box I ordered has a pretty fast Pentium, 1GB of memory, a floppy
drive (!), and a DVD burner and a CD burner. I spent around $1500,
including buying three years maintenance.

I'm not suggesting that you or anyone buys a Dell, but I'm happy enough
with it, and I think I'll have a good, usable system for several years.

Naturally, you don't have to spend anything like what I did to have a
good system.

Happy hunting!
Colin

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