# Nvidia hassles mean "replace video card". Recommendations?

## billmil

hi all,

I have an old workhorse workstation at work with an old Nvidia Quadro2 video card.  It's got fast disk drives and a decent amount of RAM: i see no need to replace it.

That said, Over the years, I've had to mask the nvidia drivers and the kernel because newer versions don't work with this card. 

Today, after upgrading gentoo-sources I had the problem documented here. In short X doesn't start up due to driver issues:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-875809-start-0.html

I will likely switch to nouveau, but in the meantime, but that's a bit of an administrative hassle (and I don't know for certain I won't have the same problem), I wanted to ask:

Can you recommend a basic replacement video card that will work for the next few years. 

I only need basic xwindows and xscreensaver. No Compiz. No Quake, etc.

I'd prefer to stick with nvidia as my kernel/make.conf/etc all points toward "nvidia".

thanks

bill

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## John R. Graham

AGP bus, I assume?

- John

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## billmil

I'm fairly certain it's agp

* the computer has an apg port (reading the specs)

* lspc shows it to be an nVidia NV17GL , which looked up against wikipedia,  shows it to be an AGP card.

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## chithanh

Your card no longer works with the nvidia-drivers because Nvidia does not provide an update for the 96.xx legacy driver and xorg-server-1.10

bug report

Nvidia forum thread

Interim solution: stay with xorg-server-1.9 or use nouveau.

Nouveau (and the open source drivers in general) suffers from no such problems. If you want a card that works over several years, even when the vendor has lost interest in it, stay away from the proprietary drivers.

btw. you can buy semi-modern AGP cards still, but they are expensive and it is generally not worth it.

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## Mad Merlin

As mentioned above, if you don't care about 3D performance, nouveau should work for you swimmingly with newer X/Kernel.

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