Unsure about cards

[wierdbeard65]

Hi,

I'm very much still at the proof of concept (to the family) stage and so am trying to get by spending as little cash as I can for the time being. I have managed to build a dedicated core (810) out of old bits and pieces that I had lying around and it seems to be running fairly well.

My first MD will be going in my living room, where I have a SKY tv STB. I have a PVR150 card to hook up to the STB and a USBUIRT to control both the STB and the TV.

My MD is an old Compaq EVO D51S which has no HDD in it. I have managed to get to to boot ok and run the AVWizard etc etc using the on-board graphics facilities. I can't get any sound out of the on-board sound system though. I also don't have a functioning mouse (which makes using the Orbiter "interesting"!!!)

Ok, the unit has 2 PCI slots and what looks like an AGP slot, however the mounting plate on the back is only 65mm high, rather than the (I think) standard 100mm. (I have seen a spec sheet that describes this as a low-profile AGP 4x slot.)

So...

Can I use this AGP port and if so, where can I find a card that will both fit and work with MCE? I can then use the 2 PCI slots for my PVR150 and a sound card (can anyone suggest a good budget one. I don't need surround sound etc etc.!)

TIA

[colinjones]

There's no reason why you can't use AGP (although I have never actually set one up) just make sure you buy a low-profile card version (yes they exist) and it uses an nVidia chipset.

[Techstyle]

I have a couple of AGP cards in my MD's.  they are both NVIDIA GeForce 440MX chipsets with 128mb's.  One of them was not recognized and would blank screen.  I set up with the other card and once set up swapped it over.

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/User:Techstyle for a bit more detail

[wierdbeard65]

Thanks for the feedback, guys!

I've managed to source (I think) a Nvidia Geforce 4, MX440, AGP, 64mb Low Profile. We'll see if it does the business.

What would you recommend for sound? Nothing fancy!

[colinjones]

as ever, anything that has a Linux ALSA driver will work fine (check the driver against the Linux kernel number you are running, eg 2.6.22-14 for 0710 can't remember the kernel number for 0810 at the moment, I think 27?)