Thanks for the background Carpetsmoker. I'm going to leave my xorg configuration as is, to ensure I don't blow out any of the hardware on this thing. It's slow indeed... but, I'm not doing anything graphically intensive, so it will do the job for now.
(Side note: I'd actually like to get into driver development, so these issues are great to run into. Now I just need to find out how to get into driver development
)