Both of you (Gerald and Andrew) seem to recommend ATI cards.  I was really
hoping to avoid ATI cards.  At least for PCI, they are trash as far as I'm
concerned.  (When I got an ATI PCI card a couple of years ago, I wore my
fingers raw trying to get it seated properly.  I finally gave up in
disugust and bought a no-name board that Just Worked the first time I
plugged it in.)  Maybe they are better for AGP, though.


Did you *personally* install the cards, or did you get a computer that had
it pre-installed by some poor tech?

(I fought with the ATI card in two machines.  The *one* time that it
actually worked, it was in the "wrong" computer, but I thought that I had
worked out the secret to seating it, so I pulled it out and it never
worked again thereafter.  I tried several different slots, spread over the
two machines---and other things (and other video cards) worked flawlessly
in those slots that the ATI card wouldn't work in, so it wasn't a
defective slot.)

The problem, I think, is that the ATI card uses too-short an edge
connector on its card.  (It is visibly much shorter on their PCI card that
I tried than other PCI video cards.  This was also complained about by
someone else on one of the NetBSD lists as I recall.)  I don't know if
this is a problem peculiar to the PCI cards, or if it's because ATI makes
AGP cards, too, and AGP cards are *supposed* to have short connectors.


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu