Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 14

Thread: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Location
    England
    Beans
    52
    Distro
    Xubuntu

    Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    I bought a 10 year old PC that was loaded with Windows 7 and hardly ran at all. Installing Lubuntu converted it into a usable machine. I have doubled the RAM to 2 GB DDR2 667 MHz, doubled the number of memory channels to 2, doubled the processing power to a Core 2 Duo E6700 (Passmark 1694) and installed an SSD. Performance with Lubuntu 18.04 is now pretty good. Boot time is 20 seconds. Firefox takes 5 seconds to load, and most web pages load very quickly. Installing U-Block Origin has helped for sites with lots of adds. Nonetheless, some websites load slowly with Firefox (e.g. Google News with all its little pictures). The motherboard is an Intel D945GCNL with GNA 950 graphics, and has a PCI Express x16 slot. I am using the original 1024x768 monitor. A GT 710 is relatively cheap, and should be easy to install. Would it significantly reduce the load time for complex web pages?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Sep 2009
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Beans
    3,981
    Distro
    Xubuntu

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    A better graphics card will slightly help load time, but nothing really great. However, since you now have a decent machine, a cheap graphics card would probably be a good choice for the next improvement.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Dec 2014
    Beans
    2,566

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    Probably not. Your example news.google.com is 4.5 MEGABYTES, most of which is JavaScript. It ends up making over 100 network requests for various additional bits and pieces - 60 images, some more JavaScript, a few CSS-files and a lot of small JSON-files. The JavaScript does a lot of DOM-Manipulation which necessitates complete recalculation of the page layout. A more powerful graphics board won't help with that.

    Holger

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Location
    England
    Beans
    52
    Distro
    Xubuntu

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    Quote Originally Posted by Holger_Gehrke View Post
    Probably not. Your example news.google.com is 4.5 MEGABYTES, most of which is JavaScript. It ends up making over 100 network requests for various additional bits and pieces - 60 images, some more JavaScript, a few CSS-files and a lot of small JSON-files. The JavaScript does a lot of DOM-Manipulation which necessitates complete recalculation of the page layout. A more powerful graphics board won't help with that.

    Holger
    I feared that would be the case. It should save a little memory, but I now have plenty with 2 GB. It should also save a little contention for memory. The graphics processing will also be quicker, but there probably is not much to do. Firefox can offload some processing to the GPU, but, again, I doubt whether that would be noticeable.

    I am comparing this old PC with a Haswell i5 4460, which is about four times as fast. That is inevitably going to be faster.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jun 2007
    Beans
    14,783

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    I would still try and add a cheap, passively-cooled GPU if I planned on seriously using this system. The GMA950 is woeful (only OpenGL 1.4 and no H.264 decode accel).

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Location
    England
    Beans
    52
    Distro
    Xubuntu

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    I have done a couple of experiments. Scrolling in Firefox has been flicking. I tried turning off "Use hardware acceleration when available". That seemed to marginally improve scrolling. I turned off "Smooth scrolling". That was much better. The scroll moves in jumps, but everything moves cleanly together. Again, if anything, the scroll is better with hardware acceleration turned off.

    The GT 710 that is was considering fitting was the passively cooled 1 GB version.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Location
    England
    Beans
    52
    Distro
    Xubuntu

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    Those modifications have made a huge difference. Firefox scrolling is much better. Google News now loads in 4 seconds over a 10 Mb/s line. More to the point, the images are displayed immediately, so that I can scroll down immediately. Using graphics acceleration with the GMA 950 clobbers the performance. Perhaps putting in a half decent GPU would enable hardware acceleration to give a tangible benefit. I can only accommodate a half height card, and I only have a 250 W power supply. Nonetheless, the MSI passively cooled 1GB version of the FT 710 comes with half height brackets and only consumes 19 W, or probably less with 2D graphics.

    What we really want is someone who has an old machine with a graphics card who can compare the performance with and without using the card.
    Last edited by geofftf; August 21st, 2018 at 11:49 AM.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Location
    England
    Beans
    52
    Distro
    Xubuntu

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    It is not up to date, but I found this:

    https://helgeklein.com/blog/2014/12/...ser-cpu-usage/

    This article leads me to doubt whether hardware acceleration would help me even with a powerful GPU. It appears to increase CPU for the basic stuff, and I have the original PCI Express, which is half as fast as PCI Express 2.0. The web is full of sites saying that Firefox hardware acceleration causes all sorts of problems and worsens performance rather than improving it.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Beans
    1

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    Quote Originally Posted by geofftf View Post
    Those modifications have made a huge difference. Firefox scrolling is much better. Google News now loads in 4 seconds over a 10 Mb/s line. More to the point, the images are displayed immediately, so that I can scroll down immediately. Using graphics acceleration with the GMA 950 clobbers the performance. Perhaps putting in a half decent GPU would enable hardware acceleration to give a tangible benefit. I can only accommodate a half height card, and I only have a 250 W power supply. Nonetheless, the MSI passively cooled 1GB version of the FT 710 comes with half height brackets and only consumes 19 W, or probably less with 2D graphics.

    What we really want is someone who has an old machine with a graphics card who can compare the performance with and without using the card.
    .
    Hi geofftf, you have such.
    (the leaning towards using lower case around here leads me to think I might be the only grey-beard over here?)
    Instead of binning an old little used Pentium PC, decided to play Linux. Have spare GT 710 GPU.
    Now, someone please tell me how to start?
    Have downloaded Lubuntu image, do I just flash it to a HDD after giving Bill Gates a Format:C: ?
    Abe53.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Location
    England
    Beans
    52
    Distro
    Xubuntu

    Re: Is it worth adding a graphics card?

    Put a blank DVD in the DVD drive. Right click on the downloaded iso file. Select Burn. Tick the box to verify after burning. Boot with the newly burned DVD in the DVD drive. You may need to select the DVD drive as the boot drive by going into the boot menu, or alter the boot priority by going into the BIOS.

Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast

Tags for this Thread

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •