Chryon:
That's exactly the type of site I expected to exist but couldn't find before.

It's a full sized tower case and other slots are empty, so I think only power draw would be a potential issue... although those cards do look a little long - what's with the weird fin/handle things?

Patch:
Yeah I tried pointing that out - the full situation is a bit more complicated (and I don't know how much she'd be ok with sharing), but it does boil down to a no-win situation and them being useless arseholes.

Dave:
I think I've seen that site recently, from a Linux perspective - didn't occur to me that it'd be a good way to check general hardware compatibility too.

This page says the GT 730 is a PCIe 2.0 x16 - so presumably it is still backwards compatible with PCIe 1.0 too?

William:
That'd be great! I think both screens also have VGA, and according to this it has the same 200W for "Suggested PSU" and half the TDP of the existing card so should good be PSU-wise.

I'll send a PM.

Debian just worked with no issues (using built-in drivers), whilst for Windows only the DVI port worked initially - wouldn't even send a low-res signal over either VGA/HDMI ports.

After maybe half an hour of waiting for an update (which spent most of that time at 20% with no indication of progress) and the driver download apparently stuck behind it sitting at 10%, it eventually completed the update and installed the driver, but still seemed not to work for a couple more minutes, then suddenly the HDMI screen blinked into life.

Anyhow, a couple of restarts later, both screens have correct resolutions, no flickering or glitching, menus look as they should, etc.

What makes you think it's the drivers - wont killing xserver cause all GUI apps to be killed, so it could still be a number of things?

Why've you got a GUI on a production server anyway?

Not a fan of Gnome either, but it's simple enough for non-power users. Cinnamon is adequate, but also limited in places, and the widget code is ugly and confusing. I was planning to switch from Cinnamon to Plasma (since I was ok with that in Debian 10), but the latest version of Plasma seems both slower and buggier, and it just doesn't gel with me, so now I'm faced with tedium of downloading half a dozen different distros/DEs to see if I can get on with any of the others.

If I could share more details, everyone would be asking why they're not requiring the use of machines they've provided, pre-configured and suitably locked-down, but why be competent when you can be cheap?