[geeks] Recommendations?

[Chris Byrne]

Well you can pick up a really nice GeForce 2 MX based board for almost
nothing these days, potentially with video in/out and multiple monitor
support, the same goes for GeForce3 and now GeForce 4 if you want even more
features (for which you spend even more money). Nvidia offers Linux drivers
if you don't mind closed source, and I know from experience that these
boards can be made to work in X (or other native GUI) with Linux, Solaris
X86, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BeOs R5, and all windows since 95. Theres no point in
going for one of the full on GeForce cards bacause your CPU wont be able to
come close to using them. THe MX's dont give up anything in image quality
and have the smae of better extra features.

The same thing goes for any recent ATI card, though their drivers are utter
shit. The cards themselves are pretty good and very feature rich, but not
the highest of performance, but since we're talking about a ppro 200 here
the framerate isnt the biggest concern its the image quality and I can say
once again from experience that it's primo.

If you are looking at 2D only, then the king of quality is (and has been for
the last decade or so) Matrox. Their 2D image quality is so much better than
any of the other brands (consumer grade products only here) it's not even
funny. And like the ATI's they have a very nice feature set outside of just
gaming performance. They have caretainly got the best multi-monitor support
out there (again consumer grade products). Also since Matrox isnt as popular
they can be a bit cheaper than a card with the equivalent feature set from
ATI or Nvidia.

Since compatibilty is a major concern for you I would stay away from the
Kyro solution or really any of the other chipsets out there.

Chris Byrne