Hello Tim,

On Wed, Jan 29, 2020 at 10:05:54PM +0000, Tim Wallace via Dng wrote:
> I have been happily running ascii but upgraded from my Intel built-in
> graphics to an AMD FirePro W4100 because I do a lot of 4K video editing,
> but no game-playing, and thought this 50W card would save energy and
> work well with 4K.  There is a nearly identical Nvidia card, but I
> decided to support AMD, for easier Linux support, which has not been my
> experience!
> [...]

> Motherboard ASRock Z97 Extreme6, i7-4790K, 16 GB, latest Bios 2.80
> [...]

In the hope this won't disappoint you too much, but in my opinion you
should have better invested the money into more memory or a fast SSD.
The main purpose of AMD FirePro as well as the NVidia Quadro Cards are
multi monitor configuration (They have lots of connectors) Do you have
multiple monitors? If you compare their specs with the "gamer" cards
you'll see that you get much less gpu performance for the
same pricing. Their power consumption is low, because they are typically
build from the lowest performance chips of a series, Often even clocked
down variants.

I suppose the W4100 to be something like an R7 250E card, which is
actually the same as an Radeon HD7750 (Like mine, 5 years old).

If have a single monitor, you'd better use a recent gamer card. You should
remind, that the "Power Consumption" is the maximum value the card will
take under full load. Typical GPUs have 8-15 W during Desktop use. My
current favorite would be an Radeon RX550X. Its twice as fast as the
W4100 but costs only about 90€. Also current cards have better Video
decoding and Encoding capabilities than the old ones.

I suppose the integrated GPU of the i7 can also drive a 4K Display
provided the Mainboard has Display Port Connector. It should work without
issues on any current linux distribution.

cheers,
Andreas

--
gnuPG keyid: 8C2BAF51
fingerprint: 28EE 8438 E688 D992 3661 C753 90B3 BAAA 8C2B AF51