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Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 2:41 pm
by Kymeia
Is it best to get one that's not very powerful so it doesn't suck up bandwidth from the PCI bus or doesn't it make much difference?
Any recommendations for a quiet, cool, PCI-E Scope friendly graphics card?
Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 3:14 pm
by darkrezin
Definitely get the least powerful card possible.
I've heard that Nvidia ones are better.
I haven't had good success with Radeon/NF4.
Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 4:12 pm
by valis
Above all the chipset your motherboard uses (and to a certain degree the cpu) is going to be the deciding factor on compatibility and how your Scope cards fare during use. darkrezin points out that Nforce4 is mostly to be avoided (with some users reporting degrees of success after tweaking). It's my understanding that Intel i915 & i925 boards are to be avoided too.
As for PCIe gfxcards, in '2d' mode the number of pixel pipelines and the speed of the gpu & gfxcard ram aren't going to make any difference in terms of 'swamping' the main system bus. What will make a difference is the degree to which the drivers attempt to cause windows to 'prefer' to give time to them and the gfxcard, rather than other system processes. This causes the FRAMERATE increase which is so beloved among the gamers. Buy what you can afford. If you've never going to play games then it makes 0 sense to spend any additional money on such features.
If you are going to play games then you might buy something suitable for the games you intend to play and then tweak either a 2nd hardware configuration + login for Scope-based audio work, or go to the extreme and do separate WinXP installs for each task so that your Scope working environment can have the gfxcard drivers and pci latency settings turned down.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: valis on 2006-08-08 03:35 ]</font>