Date: Sun, 5 Apr 1998 22:55:32 +0200 (MET DST) From: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl> To: FreeBSD-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD hackers list) Subject: Summary: shopping for new video adapter Message-ID: <199804052055.WAA29452@yedi.iaf.nl>
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I've been asked for a summary, so here it is: - My question was specific to whether a Matrox Millenium II would be a good choice for (stock) Xfree and whether it would run OK on a 75Mc PCI bus. The general opinion seems to be that a Matrox Millenium II is indeed a very good card, and should run without problems on a 75Mc bus. Even 83Mc buses seem to work OK. Whether stock Xfree is OK seems to be under debate. Both claims that stock Xfree is OK and claims that you need Xaccel are present. A trip to www.xfree86.org seems to indicate that the Xfree86 distribution now supports the Millenium II. You want to take a close look on the RAMDAC speed in case you want the highest resolutions and refresh rates (and you probably do ;-) So, people sound pleased and I'll probably be getting in the near term. Wilko Snippets of received comments: ... Not unless you are willing to buy Xaccel. XFree86 doesn't support it very well at all. Xaccel 4.01 is pretty good, modulo some font-handling bugs. ... Except for teh "stock XFree" part. There *is* an X server for it, off of the SUSE stuff. But the freebsd port is unsupported. I dont' know abotu a 75MHz bus speed, though. ... I have a Millenium II, and while I only run it at 66mhz, I am very pleased with it. It comes with a minimum of 4M, and I run it at 1152x900 32bpp with that configuration. Even though the XFree86 3.3.1 drivers are considered alpha, I have had no problems with the card. I don't know about the 75mhz bus speed only because I haven't jumped into the overclocking world yet. All Millenium II's can be upgraded to 16M. It also loads my customized X cursor fully, which my #9 Motion 771 2M card didn't do. ... I've run several Milleniums at 83MHz bus speed with no difficulties. 1600x1200 is crystal clear. I highly recommend the card. ... The 4mb Millenium (not millenium 2) I have does this... I've not found any major problems with it... I beleive the driver is OK (i.e. pretty 'accelerated' ;-) ... Yes. So would the Mystique I think (using both here in 32 and 16 bit, 1152x864). They can push to 1600 x 1200. Be sure you get at least 4 MB, and a 250 MHz DAC (220 is not fast enough for 74Hz / 1200, I think). Stock 3.3.1, 3.3.2 better (Beta support for Matrox). Otherwise, some high-end S3 (Matrox is in the SVGA server). ... I can certainly say that, among the commonly available i386 video cards, the Matrox Millenium (all variants) have the best quality video output. This is likely helped along by the fact that many of the competitors use integrated RAMDACS, whereas the Millenium has a seperate TI3026 RAMDAC. Highly recommended. Don't know about 75 MHz bus speed, but while I have non fear whatsoever of overclocking CPUs, I firmly avoid doing it to things like PCI busses, since verification of proper behaviour is so much more difficult. ... _ ______________________________________________________________________ | / o / / _ Bulte email: wilko @ yedi.iaf.nl |/|/ / / /( (_) Arnhem, The Netherlands WWW: http://www.tcja.nl __________________________________________________ Powered by FreeBSD ______ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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