Hi all,

I'm banging my head over here trying to find an nVidia AGP 8x card that is (a) fast and (b) stable for both slackware 10.2/current & windows XP and after a total of (4) trips back/forth to the computer store here for different brands of the nVidia 7600GS AGP 8x card I have no luck.


Basically, I either get the card to run great in slackware or bad in windows, or vice-versa.

It's only 7600GS cards that I've tried so far, but different manufacturer's.

I was wondering if anyone else is (a) using this card with slackware either 10.2 or current; or (b) recommends a different card that's fast for an AGP 8x system that's not over $200 US, or are those days gone?

Maybe this card w/nVidia's drivers work better in slackware current?

From what I read, nVidia's 7600GS is the second fastest AGP 8x card going. The fastest being the 7800 GS, but that card costs almost 400$ US; and at that point I guess I'm better to build a new pc and get a faster card / pci express.

Wow, these marketing types really know how to take advantage of a situation. You can buy 7800 pci-express cards for 180 $ US and it's twice the performance than this 7600GS AGP, oh well, I guess my mobo has become extinct?

Maybe this 7600GS is a band-aid that does not fit the bill?

I'm presently using a radeon 9600XT and, seeing how slackware's next version seem's to maybe be more nvidia friendly ? I was going to switch. But now I'm not so sure.

I've been so spoiled using ATI cards built by ATI that drivers always worked, I wasn't plauged by the various manufacturer's tinkering with things it appears this is still happening on nVidia cards? But hard to tell.

Oh, and these 7600GS cards all of them pny, evga, etc can only use driver's from the manufacturer's cd! They are not supported from nVidia's 'unified driver' even in windows. Well, not yet according to the tech support's, What's that all about.

Just need some guidance, I've been away from nVidia so long, maybe I'm looking into the wrong card and should get something else?

Thank you in advance for any guidance.

-Fogie

Hey Fogie,

I'm using an evga GeForce 7800 GT (pci-express) and I have had no problems at all with my card in Slackware-current (and Windows too). This is with the 8774 version of the driver.

How are you installing the Linux drivers? Are you compiling your own driver when you run the driver script, or do you use the option in the script that tries to download a driver from nVidia's site?

Also, the nVidia driver come with a README.txt that lists lots and lots of options that you could configure for X. If you are having some performance problems in X with the nVidia driver then you might need to use some of these options.

The drivers (both the Linux-IA32 and Windows versions) from the nVidia website should work for any recent nVidia card. My card is made by evga, but I always get the latest drivers from nVidia's website. In fact, I think evga's website just points to the drivers on nVidia's site.

There is a new nVidia's driver for Windoze XP. I thought you would like to check it out.
As for your problem... well I don't know how to recommend you an AGP card since I'm on PCI-express for a while now. I had a EVGA e-GeForce 6600GT w/ 128 Mb GDDR3, right now I'm saving money to buy a EVGA e-GeForce 7900GTX w/ 512Mb GDDR3.
I haven't had any noticeable differences while running on windoze and on linux (performance always feels better on linux, though). But for what I have read, AGP is dying in the market and soon shall be pulled out, maybe it's a better idea to get something PCI-e based (albeit, a mobo and proc replacement might be needed) as the prices are almost the same. Anyway, in the near future there shall not be a lot of AGP cards to choose, I'm sure.
Whatever you do, if you want to save hassle for yourself on linux, sticking to nVidia is the smart thing to do.

Old Fogie,

What do you need the speed for? Are you playing games?

I'm running a Nvidia GeForce FX5200 chipset card. They're cheap
and work with either the vesa driver right out of the box with
Slackware, or nvidia with the Nvidia drivers. Easy as pie, and
these cards cost about $30.

I'm using a gf6800 with 8x agp cant say I notice any difference between XP (games only) and slack (everything else).

I noticed there are now two versions of the nvidia driver, one called Legacy gpu version. What is the difference between the two?

the legacy driver is for older gfx cards. theres a sticky on it in the nvidia forums.

Hi all,

@raska: thanks for the update on the new driver, I'm going to give that a shot and see.

regarding the "drivers on cd work only for 7600GS", I hope this link works, basically to get to it, it's evga ->message boards -> GeForce 7 Series Family Forum -> 1st page 7600GS Driver Problem:

http://www.evga.com/community/messag...TOPIC_ID=18496


This is the same that I found on the bfg, pny and evga! Those manufacturer's point you to nvidia's site to pull down drivers for windows, and the windows drivers simply cannot/will not go in. hopefully that changes w/the new drivers that 'raska' pointed out to me. But at the moment, I've had no luck.

I was hoping to avoid going new pc for obvious reasons, time, money, growing pains in building my own system, etc.

It was driver "h-e-double-toothepicks", in windows I'd get the infamous blue screen of death in Windows XP service pack 2, on a system that never had any video drivers ever installed, just the ATI card I had using standard windows drivers, pulled the card out and tried the nvidia's. One of the cards did work in windows, but I kept getting video card error's on exit messages from unreal tournament 2004 and doom3d demo. In addition, my AutoCAD died on start-up. But that card worked spectacular in linux side. But I need both to work obviously, for some games yes, but more for work too.

It was nice to see KDE with the translucency in slackware, it looked really nice. Tho for some reason, maximizing a window, required to move the window with the mouse really quick for the whole window to show; probably a tweak I need to do, tho I didnt spend more than 5 minutes on it to be honest w/a few pointers from the gentoo wiki on how to configure my xorg.conf file.

for slackware on these cards, I've been using the driver from nvidia's website. I've been telling the installer "no" to downloading a premade module, and let it build locally for me. I'm using the 2.6.17.11 kernel. I used Pat's 'bare.i-generic' kernel and added in acpi for it so I can use 'button' becuase I like being able to push the power button on my pc and it send the shutdown command to KDE and power off for me in one swoop :d

Could an acpi option be at fault I dont know.

I had really bad problems in KDE on slack 10.2 w/ut2004, penguin racer, and firefox taking a dive on website's with flash. The gimp had artifacts on buttons too. I had reset/turned off the translucency stuff w/restore defaults in KDE too to verify and rebooted X.

I suspect? and not sure, that maybe, as this card was originally designed as PCI-express and then the manufacturer's mod it to be AGP the drivers get a 'hiccup' or something here or there. some algorithym of some kind not tweaked 100% or not.

maybe I bought this card a little prematurely in it's developement after release. they did release it a month or two ago, and well, we all know how the computer industry is, build it ship it then maybe fix it

I just wonder if mabye someone was using this AGP card in slackware current, as current does have a different Xorg so maybe I'd have totally different results for that?

Weird. I've had repainting problems too, with the 2.4.31 Kernel from the default install (sata.i, the Kernel with SATA support). I'm using the most recent driver from the NVidia site, and I have a GeForce 5600 FX card. After switching to Kernel 2.6.16, only some KDE apps have some gfx artifacts left, all other apps seem to paint ok.

In an earlier installation, with the previous driver release, none of this did occur. (however, for Kernel 2.6, you have to patch the driver)

During boot up, I get the message that the module "agpart" would be missing, but the later on, "agpart" reports that it's initializing etc.

On my current install, there's no 3D apps yet, and the system is quite blank, so I first have to install more stuff to see if the new driver has any other problems.

well the long and short of it, after so many different company's versions of this card, I even tried the 7800, and the 7600 OC model, and so many driver versions, and SuSe10.1GM, fedora, ubuntu and slackware I am giving up on nvidia. the long end of my quest to get nvidia to work has come to an end. Sadly, if I can't get DRI for my 9600xt in slackware 11 then I guess I have to go to a different distro ? We'll see.....pat don't let me down

You won't go wrong with a 6600GT. They're great cards. Works with both Linux and Windows.

Originally posted by byte weaver
I have a GeForce 5200 FX on a couple of different boxen, both of
them running 2.6 kernels, and don't have to patch anything using
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run.

Never had any problems with graphics, or watching DVD movies.

Perhaps you have a bad card...

What patch would this be? The only patch I've ever had to use on nVidia's driver was the one for the module licence token, which has long since become deprecated.

Hi all,

I was trying to find the 6600 GT and the 6800 Ultra, wow are they really hard to come by these days. I'm still looking tho.

I tried so many different cards, on 2 different pc's and a few linux OS's and windows XP also. It's honestly IMO a bad purchase at the moment. Hopefully nVidia will do something about this. I was talking to the manager at the computer store when I took one of them back and he said that they've been getting a lot of them back, many of them with a burn smell! So maybe it's a heating issue.

I was truly hoping that card would work for me as it's under 200$ US and "linux" friendly, but such is not the case. But at this point I'm probably just better off building a new pc for myself that can handle the pci express. Now if I do that I can get a video card that's almost twice as fast as the AGP 7600 GS and about 80% less price, go figure right.

But I have a lot of reading to do for the motherboard obviously as I plan to use linux on it. Seeing how nVidia just finally gave code out for the kernel team for nforce2 and it's kind of partial, in the fact that the audio is only AC97 and dolby surround sound as my present board supports, I'm kind of afraid to take the plunge for an nforce 4 board. Am I wrong, do you gent's know if the nforce 4's are well supported or not, how they run with slackware?

I'm only using IDE hard drives, need maybe 3 pci slots, USB2, no firewire. May be good to have SATA as the hard drives seem to be going this way in future. I dont need onboard sound or lan, I find cards still work better than on-board. I'm not looking for 64 bit, I really don't see a need to take that plunge yet either. It'd be nice if I could use my 2 sticks of 512 mb pc3200 ram tho, I'd hate to have to throw out my old ram just to get a new board.

Any thoughts are truly appreciated.

Hey buddy
I just wanted to feedback that NForce 4 works finely on Slackware and I think that there is nothing to be afraid of
I think that currently will be pretty difficult to buy a non-64-bit processor and Intel and AMD are pushing this technology really hard and I believe that everything in the market now has 64-bit capabilities, but I'm not so sure on the Intel side, I'm not a Intel-loving guy I wouldn't hurt if you don't go 64-bit, just install Slackware as always and everything must run just fine. You could use the same memory without trouble on AMD
My current PC:
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ ~ 2.2 GHz 1Mb L2 cache, socket 939 (San Diego core, 90nm)
2 gigs (4 x 512) PC3200 DDR400 kingston Dual-Channel installed RAM | 3 - 3 - 3 - 8
ASUS A8N-E motherboard, nForce4 Ultra chipset (onboard Giga-LAN and AC97 sound, pretty nice mobo)
2 x Maxtor SATA2.0, 250 gigs each as RAID0
1 x Maxtor EIDE, 160 gigs
Sony DVD-ROM 16x, 48x
Sony DVD-R/RW 16x, 40x

As I mentioned before, I had an EVGA e-GeForce 6600GT ~ 128 Mb GDDR3 (500MHz core, 1GHz memory) but I sold it like I month ago, not for failures it worked perfectly, currently I'm living with a generic PCI video card. I'm waiting for my damn dealer (he's taking too much time ) to get me an EVGA e-GeForce 7900GTX ~ 512 Mb GDDR3 (650MHz core, 1.6GHz memory) to run games like hell