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Old 5th May 2008
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Grogan Grogan is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 23
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I wouldn't bother buying a new Nvidia card for amd64 FreeBSD... Nvidia doesn't have 64 bit drivers for FreeBSD and you'lll be stuck using the xorg nv driver just like you are now. You will gain zero benefit because you won't be making use of hardware acceleration anyways. A new card will not perform any better than your current onboard Nvidia adapter for the functionality you will have.

I didn't realize this until after I already had the amd64 FreeBSD7 all set up and tweaked. I went to get Nvidia drivers in preparation to play Sauerbraten and... disappointment. People have been asking for them since 2005 and still no joy so I'm not holding my breath. Oh well, I love this setup I have now and I'm not going back to 32 bit just to be able to play a few games.

It sickens me, but I have a Windows Vista install that I use for games. I've also got a very nice x86_64 Linux (from scratch) setup on here.

--------------------------------------------------------
Now, here's what I'm running FreeBSD on:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU

Board is Intel 965P chipset based from Gigabyte

4 Gb DDR2 RAM

9 Gb UFS partition for / (the rest of my storage is Linux ext3 that I can use, and NTFS that would be read-only if I cared). I have two 250 Gb drives in this rig.

Video card is Nvidia 8800GTS 640 Mb. As I said, useless for anything but ordinary desktop stuff because there's no nvidia driver for FreeBSD AMD64

Monitor is a Viewsonic 19" LCD

NIC is a plain jane D-Link realtek 8139 based card...the rl driver in kernel. (stupid onboard Yukon2 disabled... I hate it)

Audio is onboard Intel High Definition audio, and it's absolutely superb in FreeBSD. I love the OSS drivers. Linux ALSA blows chunks.

OS is FreeBSD 7.0 release, with upgraded ports tree.

FreeBSD cramit 7.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE #0: Thu May 1 00:55:45 EDT 2008 root@cramit:/usr/src/sys/amd64/compile/GROGAN amd64

Last edited by Grogan; 5th May 2008 at 09:27 PM. Reason: Forgot motherboard chipset
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