AMD Duron: Should be okay.  (I'm using an Athlon, right now.)

ATI video card: I don't know what their general trend is.  It sounds like
they have nice-to-use cards, if you can install them and support
them.  The one ATI card that I tried to use (a low-end $60 card, whose
name I forget) gave me nothing but trouble, however.

It was a PCI card (not AGP), and its plated connector leads were maybe
2/3rds, maybe 1/2, the length of some other cards' leads.  The ATI card
was almost impossible to seat properly so that the PCI bus could
communicate with it.  After installing the same card dozens of times
between two machines, and trying different slots in case it was a problem
with one slot or another, my fingers were getting raw.  I only ONCE got it
to work, and then it was in the ``other'' machine (not the one that I
wanted it in).

I ultimately put the ATI card back in its box and returned it.

This was only ONE instance of ONE model of a PCI card from ATI.  It was
also admittedly a fairly low-end card (at the time, it was the cheapest
card that I could find on short notice at a local dealer).  Their other
cards, esp. for AGP, may not suffer from this.  Still, if it were my
money, I'd be leary of another ATI card, and wouldn't dream of buying one
if it wasn't from a source that I knew would give me no trouble about
refunding the card if I was dissatisfied.

Hopefully, it won't give you any problems, but if it does, it's probably
not worth working your fingers raw like I did.


Also, if you're throwing a fair bit of money at a nice video card, I
assume that you're doing it for 3D graphics?  At least under NetBSD,
XFree86 4.x does not yet provide any hardware accelerated 3D support, as I
understand it.  (On the other hand, the graphics/Mesa-glx package _does_
provide some such support under NetBSD, based on XFree86 3.3.x servers,
for a very small handful of cards.)

If you intend to use some ``other'' OS for the 3D graphics support, this
may not bother you, so long as you can get basic X up and running on the
card under NetBSD.


Re. the XFree86 4.0 build: I wimped out and installed their distribution
binaries.  That was quite straightforward as I recall.  However, there was
no real benefit to me, and a number of small wrinkles existed, so I ended
up switching back to 3.3.6 when I upgraded to NetBSD 1.5.

(4.x _does_ basically work, though.  If there's something about it that
you really need or want---like support for your chosen card (^&---then
it's probably worth switching.)


Good luck with your new system.


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu