NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 On Linux: I'd Rather Have Maxwell

Throughout all of the Linux OpenGL gaming tests and benchmarks run on the EVGA GeForce GT 740 Super-Clocked, the average temperature was 44 Celsius with a peak of 50 Celsius and when idling the Kepler-based GPU bottomed out at 29 Celsius. Cooling isn't an issue with this low-end EVGA graphics card.

The average AC power draw of the Core i7 4770K system with GT 740 was 93 Watts with a peak of 113 Watts over the course of the benchmarking.

While the NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 graphics card will run just fine with the proprietary NVIDIA graphics card, I'm less than impressed by this ~$90 USD graphics card. The performance of the GeForce GT 740 is roughly that of the GeForce GTX 650, but its launch is coming months after NVIDIA introduced Maxwell with the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 750 can be found for ~$110 and offers measurably better performance, is based upon NVIDIA's latest-generation architecture, and the performance-per-Watt is a big step forward over Kepler. The GTX 750 can be found for around $110+ with "super clocked" models from EVGA just going for around $120 while the GTX 750 Ti model is more expensive at around $150.

Unless you simply need a graphics card for a composited Linux desktop or accelerated video playback and absolutely need something under $100 USD, the GT 740 is fine, but otherwise for just about $20 more you can get a much better experience with the GeForce GTX 750 that works equally well under Linux.

For those wishing to see how your own Linux system's performance compares to the various tested AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, it is as easy as installing the Phoronix Test Suite on the distribution of your choice and then run MONITOR=gpu.temp phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1406063-KH-NVIDIAGT745. It's that easy with our fully-automated, open-source benchmarking software.