Mobility Radeon x1800

[maniacmusician]

Hey,

I'm considering buying a Dell XPS M2010....the only problem I see with it is that it has an ATI card. A Mobility Radeon x1800. I searched the forums a little but couldnt come up with any recent credible posts. So, does anyone use this card and can comment on its usability with linux?

thanks.

PS: No, I'm not very hopeful...but if it's not available, I'll have to drop down to the M1710 instead. Which is also pretty good, so :)

[PriceChild]

This card won't work very well with the ati drivers at all...

You really should search harder for nvidia :)

[maniacmusician]

I was just wondering :) like I said, I'll probably end up getting the M1710, which does have an Nvidia card, a "GeForce Go 7900 GTX Graphics Card".

By the way, the M1710, by the time I've customized to what I want, comes out to around 5400 ](*,) On the flipside, it is one hot notebook.

oddly enough, the most expensive thing seems to be the RAM. Seems to be 600 US dollars for 1 GB? And I'm getting 4 GBs.

[PriceChild]

Personally i think you should split the money in half, then get yourself and me a still reasonably decent laptop :)

[shining]

Personally i think you should split the money in half, then get yourself and me a still reasonably decent laptop :)

Sounds like a reasonable idea :)

[darkninja]

Believe me, you DON'T want to buy a laptop with an ATi card for Linux, especially a X1000 series.

Some of the things I've had to put up with on my mobile X1400 include:

-No FOSS driver, ATi seems to be holding back a developer who was working on one due to NDA issues.
-No Linux support what so ever until 4 months after it was released.
-No 3D until a month or two after that
-No XVideo acceleration and then faulty XVideo acceleration for until the last 3 months
-Last and month before this month driver release broke XVideo in X.org 7.1
-FGLRX driver included in Edgy doesn't have working XVideo.
-Still occasional problems with suspend/hibernation.
-Still no AIGLX support.

In short, ATi on Linux, DON'T DO IT! You'll be much happier with a NVidia or Intel graphics.

[maniacmusician]

@darkninja; Thanks. I was just wondering about the x1000 series. I already know ATI on linux sucks, my current setup is frustrating me to no end!

I'm going for the XPS M1710, I think. But I'm buying it next year, so no hurry.

@PriceChild: :p It's actually a graduation president for me, so I couldn't split it even if I wanted to :) haha though I doubt I would anyways ;)

Honestly, I do hate to spend this much money on it, but I can't find anything reliable with same or better specs for less money :(. I reckon I'll start another "help me find a laptop" thread soon.

[PriceChild]

x1*00 is pretty bad... but x1800 particularly so on linux.

That's what im hearign from friends using it.

[WalmartSniperLX]

Yup everyone here is right :( I wish ati would pull it together, mainly for the X1K cards. Im running a X1600pro, and I get less performance than my laptop with a 9200 radeon onboard :S There's practically no 2D/3D acceleration at all :S even with the newest fglrx drivers

Nvidia/Intel is the way to go, unless AMD fixes ati's horrible driver support teams :D