ATI HD550v

philllip.gresham

I am planning to replace my 7-year-old Dell Inspiron laptop with something more modern.

I am considering the Inspiron 14R. It has a fast processor, and it's a good compromise between weight and screen size. However, the video card I am thinking about getting is the 1GB ATI Radeon HD550V.

I can't find many reviews about the compatibility with linux, particularly Fedora. Has anyone used this video card? Does anyone have experience with the Inspiron 14[r]? The hardware, other than the video card, seems pretty standard. The wireless card is a Dell (probably Broadcom), so it should work without any problems.

Thanks.

mfillpot

I see your issue with finding reviews. In general I and many other Linux users avoid ATI chipsets because of the lack of good open source or proprietary drivers for those devices. The status may have changed since the last time I attempted to use an ATI card and I have seen some somewhat good reviews of newer ATI cards on LinuxQuestions.org. If possible I would recommend going with an Nvidia card, but the chances are good that the support for your chosen card is adequate.

Goineasy9

Hey Philip
ATI cards have mixed reviews depending on the distro you choose. The proprietary drivers work in distros that aren't bleeding edge. Bleeding edge distros like fedora have open source drivers that I'm very happy with, but, it's almost impossible to get the proprietary drivers working with them. Right now I have more luck with Nvidia, but, I'm guessing that before long ATI might be easier to configure. Confused? So am I. Stick with Nvidia at the moment...it's less problematic.

saqman2060

I agree about using Nvidia graphic cards. From the distros I used, I had little to no problems using the opensource drivers provided by the distros to work with Nvidia.

I am however using a 1GB ATI radeon vidoe card with ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10. Both distros work fine with it. The only catch, I could not use the opensouce drivers that ubuntu recommended. Instead I used the proprietary driver for the video. Since then I hadn't had issues.

It really depends on the distro. My recommendation is to try it out and see what happens. It doesn't hurt to try.