Graphics card recommendation?

[mike cloaked]

    Timothy Murphy-5 wrote:
    >Thanks very much for this useful summary.
    >As you said in another posting,
    >I'm perfectly happy with any graphics that actually works,
    >the problem lies with the younger generation
    >who have higher expectations.

I have in the past 6 months bought two cheap graphics cards that I use
with the kmod-nvidia from rpmfusion and give pretty reasonable 3d
graphics performance - eg google-earth works just fine.

1) ZOTAC 256MB GEF FX5200 PCI
2) Asus 256MB 8400GS/Silent/HTP Passiv PCIe

These I bought from Amazon to get two old machines with integrated
Intel graphics working acceptably in F10. They were a) simple to plug
in and go, b) cheap, and c) did not need any additional power leads
plugging in. The first one has a very quiet fan and the second has
passive cooling so no fan at all!  Note that one is PCI and the other
is PCI-e.

As others have already mentioned you need to check your motherboard
for which slots are available. Also note that both the above cards
have both digital and analogue outputs.  I did spend a fair bit of
time researching these before I bought them but they have both worked
extremely well using the driver I mentioned above.  Perhaps in the
fullness of time Nvidia will open up and allow open source 3d drivers
to be developed but in the meantime this is an easy solution for what
you appear to need.

-- 
mike