Phoronix
Did you read the article? 190.53 was the stable driver tried.Originally Posted by Lukian
Junior Member
I love this card. If you are not into heavy gaming it is one sweet card. All my previous ones were power hungry and noisy.
I sit now and wonder if my computer is still working. It's so quiet and cool.
Temperature usually oscilates between 28-23 Celsius doing simple tasks like internet browsing.
Gaming (Quake3) and video decoding/encoding raises temperature from couple degrees into teens. And guess what. It's still silent.
Perfect midrange card once all driver bugs are ironed out.
Senior Member
Something is wrong with NVidia and Ubuntu 9.10. Do you remember the Ubuntu vs Fedora benchmarks, where Fedora was twice as fast as Ubuntu in VGA tests?
Moderator
I was thinking the same thing. Just like the GPU not throttling down in the Asus 1201N tests. I installed opensuse on one yesterday and it had no problem throttling down the igp to it's lowest state while doing vdpau playback.
Junior Member
There are a number of posts in nvnews and nvforums about GT240 performance issues that are traced to powermizer using a slow performance level, even when the card is doing OpenGL or CUDA calculations... read the relevant posts:
GT240/GDDR5 2-5 times slower under Linux (compared to windows)
http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion...p?t153703.html
(the screenshot shows that running glxgears, the card is still not using the 1.7GHz performance level).
Another thread at nvnews (same theme)
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/show...=1#post2171364
This is bug 636716 in the internal NVIDIA bug tracking system.
Junior Member
Yes, actually, but only as well as most articles on the Internet are read. Did you proof read your own article?
Page 3: "On the s/w side was Ubuntu 9.10 (x86_64) with the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, X Serv 1.6.4, and the NVIDIA 195.30 beta display driver was installed."
Further down the page, The 190.53 driver is mentioned. It's still unclear which driver was used for the tests.
A "Test Setup" page would be a nice inclusion with full details of the hardware and software used in the review.
(I was looking for such a page when I posted my comment, and the first driver mention I saw was the 195.30, so I assumed it was in use.)
It appears the 190.53 drivers were chosen for the tests because of an inability to overclock with the 195.30 driver, even though everything else was fine? I'm amused at the review utilising a "more broken, albeit stable" driver (190.53) which gave the impression of being able to overclock - when in actual fact nothing happened. Whereas the 195.30 beta driver doesn't auto-adjust the clock speeds.
Why try to overclock a GT240? It's a mainstream card, not a high-end performance card - We're linux gamers and media enthusiasts (VDPAU). Very good price, (hopefully) very long hardware life due to the cooler 40nm tech (Zotac offer a 5yr warranty if you register and a few other vendors have a standard 3 year warranty).
Summary: I would have preferred the card be tested with stable and beta drivers, not just one version. Nonetheless, thank you for the review, looking forward to seeing if the GT240 (or the Nvidia drivers) ever pull their weight under Linux, making a GT240 purchase worthwhile for me - or if I have to 'hang out' another 9 months waiting for the mainstream GF300 series (or simply WINE/nvidia improvements to help my aging 8600GT).
That said, VDPAU Feature Set C makes this card a good purchase for media enthusiasts (additional decoding of various video formats, high quality up-scaling and sharpening).
Last edited by Lukian; 01-25-2010 at 12:33 AM.
Junior Member
Since this card is supposed to support LPCM 7.1 audio, i would like to see some effort at least to verify the status of that function.. i know it's not the most widely wanted function, and that it needs a a/v amplifier that supports lpcm 7.1, equipment you might not have access to, but it's critical none the less for htpc usage.
Junior Member
A quick benchmark to see if the "Fixed a bug that prevented performance level transitions on recent GPUs with SDDR3 and GDDR5 memory." fix in the latest (195.36.15) nvidia drivers fixes the GT 240 performance issues would be very much appreciated!
http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22597
Junior Member
Are the GT 240's performance issues resolved with the "bug that prevented performance level transitions on recent GPUs with SDDR3 and GDDR5 memory" fix in the 195.36.15 drivers?
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...538#post117538
Junior Member
I am following the instructions here (http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_d...195.36.15.html) I'm using Suse (and new to linux) I'll do some tests and comment.
Sorry for my English is not very good. :S
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote