It's soon time for me to upgrade my Knoppix-based daily driver machine, and I'm looking for an opinion from the forum members..

Right now I have a SuperMicro mobo with two PIII/500's, 768MB RAM, a 2940U2W card + 9GB U160 boot drive, and two Maxtor 7200RPM 40GB IDEs.

I plan to upgrade to a MSI dual-370 board with two PIII/866's (I already own the CPUs) overclocked to approximately 1GHz apiece. I'll use the same 768MB of stable PC133 RAM and U2W card/boot drive, though I will probably replace my old 40GB Maxtor drives with a Q-Logic Fibre Channel adapter and a 72GB 10K RPM Cheetah HD (I already own the HD also).

Right now I'm running an ancient 32MB TNT2 AGP card. I do mostly 2D graphic manipulation and it is starting to feel slow (much as my G3/400 Mac with a Formac 16MB card did before it).

Are there any good AGP video cards with accelerated 2D Xfree drivers that run under Knoppix without a lot of configuration headaches? I don't need super high rez or Quake framerates, just 1024x768 at 24/32 bit and ~ 100Hz refresh.

I found the nVidia 3D driver a bit unstable with Knoppix 3.2 and my TNT2, but my diffys might also have been caused by two suspect 256MB RAM sticks I've since removed from my box. I'm OK with running a binary-only driver to get accelerated 2D/3D if it is stable. X crashing out and me losing all my work from the last hour is not my definition of stable. Even worse, I didn't really notice a speed improvement for 2D with the accelerated nVidia drivers.

What would you buy if you were me? I'm fairly brand agnostic, I don't care who makes the card if it works reliably and provides a noticable 2D (most important) and 3D (less important) speed increase over my TNT2.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

Brian
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