So I while back I had the need to buy a new new video card for my Fedora 14 desktop. Specifically I needed a semi-decent HDMI capable PCI card as my current workstation at home only has one PCI-E slot, and I wanted to use my newly acquired LSI 8888ELP in that slot. A picture of the hardware overkill is below.
Anyway, not that its pertinent to this article, but the 8888ELP was to be configured with 4 SSDs in RAID10, which to me was much cooler than having top of the line video card for a box that rarely did anything graphic intensive.
Anyway, back to the story. So I poked around online and found this big mamba-jamba PCI Nvidia card with HDMI out, which if you look at the picture below, is basically a giant heat sink with a video card attached to its undercarriage. Apparently its perfect for a HTPC as its nice and quiet without a fan. So boom, I slap that sucker in and go on with my life.
Anyway, fast forward a few months and NVIDIA has new drivers available for Linux, which supposedly offer massive performance improvements. So I figured that I would try them out, but by this time I have forgotten what video card I am using, who made it, and if I am using the vendor's drivers.
So the first thing I do is run the command below which updates the hardware descriptions which lspci spits out
Next I run lspci and figure out that I have an NVIDIA Card.
06:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 430] (rev a1)
Ok now lets see if I am using NVIDIA's drivers. I accompish this by attempting to run the command below
# nvidia-settings
Which pops up a nice little GUI, that tells me which driver version I am running.
NVIDIA Driver Version :280.13
Comments