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From: daparnin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Like I said, I haven't done the current research that you have. Unless I'm misunderstanding it looks like you may be using the nVidia along with the built-in motherboard video. That may be the source of the incompatibility. If so, you may have to disable the on board video and buy a second nVidia card. An AGP slot would give you better performance but since you don't have one then you will have to go with the PCI-whatever.
Nope, no AGP slot. Decent on-board hardware (an ATI 7000, I think), but it's throttled down to 1024x768 in order to support terminal services. If you make the resolution any higher, what you get is a "virtual desktop", where it only show 1024x768 pixels of the screen as a time, and as you move the cursor it "scrolls". Not much good for anything.
When I built my system a few years ago I decided to splurge. I decided to invest more up front to not compromise what I really wanted, get good quality, and have a fast system that would last longer than a low-priced one. It looks like you are a "value-conscious" consumer. I'm all for saving money as long as you get what you want. I "saved" money by investing in the specific components and not buying a brand name like the xSeries.
On the cost-conscious side, yes and no. I bought the xSeries because I got a decent deal from IBM: dual 3.2 Xeon with 2MB cache, 2GB of RAM and 146GB of 15K RAID-5 disk for about $3000. This is a machine that ought to last a couple of years, and I couldn't match the price anywhere (the disks alone cost $900). I could probably beat the price if I built my own, but not by much, and I don't really want my mission critical systems to depend on my hardware expertise (or lack thereof) :).
If it's just business apps then you should be fine going the low-price route. If you plan on playing games or playing/editing video you may want/need to invest a bit more than $100. Again, I'm not up on the latest cards, prices, and performance. YMMV.
On the other hand, yeah, I am trying to be a little cost-conscious on the board. I don't need a $500 board; I really just want to have the extra real estate for application development (it's really nice to have two full pages of a document up, or be able to have Google and Word side by side; now I want to take advantage of that same width for WDSC). So all I need is a card that can handle SWXGA resolution and fit in one of my slots. I have several PCI-X slots and two PCI-E slots, with the caveat that the PCI-E slots are only 8x. Unfortunately, people advertising on Google are now using "PCI-X" to stand for PCI Express, so I can't even FIND any PCI-X cards. So I continue to hate hardware :). Joe
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