PCI GFX FTW!
I recently redeployed my main desktop computer to be a virtualisation hub. I’m going to run a headless VirtualBox setup on Ubuntu with it. It’ll only be using CLI. At the moment the specs of the desktop are:
- 3G DDR2
- 2.66Ghz Core2Duo
- Asus P5K
- ATI Radeon 2900XT
Now, when idle, Core2Duo’s are quite power efficient. And I’m going to be merging 3 physical boxes into this one, but none of them do continuous work (hence why I’m merging them). For some reason, when sitting idle (I haven’t installed the real OS yet, it’s just a testing version of Debian Lenny on there with no services), the machine was still spewing out heat.
It turns out that even on a CLI, the Radeon card gets quite toasty. I mean, not hot by gaming standards, but hot compared to say, an entry level card. I happened to have an entry level card around: an ATI X1300. So I thought, I’ll quickly swap them out, ensure that it was indeed the GFX card, and go merrily on my way. No such luck. The X1300 was a dud. Sometimes the PC would get to the POST if I wiggled the card, only to complain that it didn’t have a card, and other times it just wouldn’t POST at all.
Now, this is a 2008 model system. I mean, it’s early 2008, but it was top of the line. But it has PCI cards. And I figured I had a TNT2 PCI version around somewhere, or something. The “or something” turned out to be a generic PCI card. I also had an S3 trident, but I wanted to see if the generic card worked. It looked older than the S3. That means it’s about 20 years old now. I didn’t even know if recent motherboards are able to detect and boot with a PCI graphics card only. I do now. They can. Mine did. Sweeeet! It makes _no heat_. There’s not even a heat sink on the card. It doesn’t display the BIOS graphics splash screen properly (the whole “powered by Intel” image), but it displays the actual text fine, BIOS is fine, VESA images is fine (i.e. the Linux boot splash screen). It’s so cool. It also takes up a fraction of the space that the 2900XT did.
Now my system runs cool and uses less power, I’m happy[ier] 