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2 months agoI’m a bit surprised an Nvidia 9x0 would struggle for web browsing. On a PC this old I would first check other things before swapping the GPU:
- Is it clean? Physically clean? Restricted air flow can make your CPU throttle down to avoid getting too hot.
- Is the operating system on an SSD or a spinning disk? I’m sure prices are insane nowadays but a small data SSD just for the OS will dramatically improve performance.
- How much RAM do you have? Again, prices are not good right now, but 8GiB is the minimum to run a modern desktop+browser.
- Do you have the proprietary drivers installed? I haven’t touched an Nvidia GPU on Linux in a long time, but I would expect those to be basically mandatory for a smooth experience.
As for the GPU, if you are not gaming on big modern titles, anything released in the last ten years should be enough. I had a good experience with AMD over this era for out of the box Linux compatibility, but I can’t say much about codecs, I never had issues and never bothered to check.
Intel is probably good enough also.
Another thing to consider is maybe your CPU has a built-in GPU, I use low/mid-range Intel CPU from this era without a discrete GPU as an HTPC and it performs fine.
Maybe you have hard links or sparse files in your source directory. Try with -H for hard links first. You can try with --sparse but I think hard links are more likely.