Video Card Upgrade-How To?

John L Novice · #1 10th March 2009, 04:25 PM

Need to swap out my geforce 6200 for a ti 4200
now I could use a newer nvidia card instead if going to an older card would be a problem

how should I go about doing this?

is it potentially disastrous?

John L Novice · #2 10th March 2009, 04:53 PM

Perhaps I should add that doing a clean install is an option, however I'd rather not go into that atm

I'm hoping that it shouldn't be a problem as they are both nvidia cards.
If it is just a matter of changing to a generic driver before the swap then reverting to nvidia driver that should be np.
If it gets borked, c'est la vie, I'll do the upgrade to 10 over the weekend.

I would prefer to make the attempt at the swap without doing a clean install atm.

brb

jbuckley2004 · #3 10th March 2009, 05:20 PM

John, I basically did the same two weeks ago. I upgraded from the motherboard's on-board graghics (ATI) to a GForce 8400, without knowing exactly what to expect during the switch.

So I backed up everything.

Next I physically installed the board and warmed up the installation disk, just in case.

Then I hit "restart".

Then I prayed (to Linus, I think ;>)

F10 was smart enough to recognize the upgrade and had, at the ready, a suitable default driver. It was enough for me to continue, comfortably in graphics mode.

From there, I installed the most suitable driver for the nvidia card from the repos, and I was off and running and able to use desktop effects and Google Earth for the first time. Way cool. If there were any hitches, I didn't notice.

John L Novice · #4 10th March 2009, 05:42 PM

And that was going from an ati to an nvidia!
all right then, I'll give it a go
thanks jbuckley

(oh, and deity Linus

)

**AdamW** · #5 10th March 2009, 09:32 PM

If you're just using the default Fedora setup, all will be hunky dory, it'll work without any problems.

If you're using the proprietary driver, you'll have a problem, because the 4 series doesn't use the same branch of the driver as the 6 series (the 6 series is new enough to use the current branch, while the 4 series is now only supported by one of the legacy driver branches). So in that situation I'd recommend you remove the proprietary driver entirely, reboot and make sure it's working OK with the default Fedora driver with the 6 card, then switch in the 4 card, boot up, and *then* install the correct legacy driver for the 4 card.

John L Novice · #6 11th March 2009, 03:14 PM

ty AdamW
Haven't tried the swap yet...

I am using the default driver, so I take it that the default driver won't be entirely appropriate for the 4200?

In which case installing appropriate legacy driver would be recommended?
I'm not using the new abilities, ie cubic desktop effects etc, but may do

**AdamW** · #7 16th March 2009, 09:53 PM

The default *Fedora* driver is fine, because it's the open source driver, which doesn't have this multiple-drivers-for-different-hardware-generations issue. Only the proprietary NVIDIA driver does. If you're not using the proprietary driver, you don't need to do anything special at all, just swap the cards and it should Just Work.