Graphics; System Ram; Network Cards - HP xw3400 User Manual

Graphics

HP Workstations may be ordered without a graphics card, or with a selection of graphics cards that
have gone through extensive verification with HP and the graphics vendors. See the Installation
Support Matrix for a complete list of drivers and the platforms that support them. Due to power
requirements of the graphics cards and market focus of the different workstation boxes, not all
graphics cards are available on each box. Accelerated drivers that are supported by HP and the
graphics vendors are available on the Installer CD and from the HP support website. These
accelerated drivers are not found on the Red Hat CDs because they are not open source. More recent
drivers that have not been qualified by HP are sometimes available from the graphics vendor's
website. These drivers are not supported by HP, but the graphics vendor can provide some level of
support with these versions of their drivers. When installing your Red Hat OS with the HP Installer CD,
the X configuration step is replaced with default values that work well for the accelerated graphics
drivers. A default resolution of 1280x1024 is set up.

System RAM

Red Hat only supports 3 GB of memory per process, but supports a total system memory of up to 16
GB on Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 3 and Red Hat Linux 9. HP supports different amounts of total
RAM in the different boxes based on the number of hardware DIMM slots and market requirements.
The total memory supported for each hardware/OS configuration is listed in the Installation Support
Matrix. To use more than 3.5 GB of RAM, HP workstations must be booted with the bigmem kernel on
Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 8.0 and have the BIOS updated to a recent version. BIOS updates can be
downloaded from the HP support website.

Network Cards

The integrated network cards are all supported for the different workstation platforms and are set up
as the first network device (eth0) after the installation. In addition, network cards that can be ordered
separately (called AMO kits) are supported. Specifically, the Intel network cards and Broadcom
network cards are both supported. Given that all the HP workstations come with an integrated LAN
card, the additional cards can be used for a second LAN card or to replace the existing integrated
LAN.
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