I guess I should buy a new video card
I finally decided to try and figure out which fan to replace in my linux server machine since it was being rather noisy lately. I thought it was one of the cpu fans or maybe a case fan, but after checking both cpu fans, all 4 case fans, the chipset fan and the power supply fan, I finally realized it was the video card fan. I guess that isn't one you just get a replacement for. The video card is an EVGA Nvidia 8600GT. It has date codes of 0728 on parts. I guess after 17 years of service I can't complain. I am thinking maybe I will try an AMD 7600 XT and see how that amdgpu driver in the kernel is doing these days. I haven't given AMD a chance in a very long time after all. -- Len Sorensen
Before you give up, try taking the video card out of your machine, clean and vacuum it, and inspect the fan. Clean out any gunk on the spindle, then drip a very small amount of machine oil. If all these things don't quiet down your fan, then go shopping. On Fri, 9 Aug 2024 at 15:14, Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I finally decided to try and figure out which fan to replace in my linux server machine since it was being rather noisy lately. I thought it was one of the cpu fans or maybe a case fan, but after checking both cpu fans, all 4 case fans, the chipset fan and the power supply fan, I finally realized it was the video card fan. I guess that isn't one you just get a replacement for.
The video card is an EVGA Nvidia 8600GT. It has date codes of 0728 on parts. I guess after 17 years of service I can't complain.
I am thinking maybe I will try an AMD 7600 XT and see how that amdgpu driver in the kernel is doing these days. I haven't given AMD a chance in a very long time after all.
-- Len Sorensen --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
On Fri, Aug 09, 2024 at 04:54:54PM -0400, Don Tai wrote:
Before you give up, try taking the video card out of your machine, clean and vacuum it, and inspect the fan. Clean out any gunk on the spindle, then drip a very small amount of machine oil. If all these things don't quiet down your fan, then go shopping.
The bearing sounds like it is full of debris when I turn it. And it does not seem to have much dust in or on it. I think I have gone way beyond the expected life of that poor bearing. Oh on closer inspection, it appears a few fan blades have lost some corners. I guess the plastic got brittle over time and gave up. No wonder it is wobbly. -- Len Sorensen
From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
The video card is an EVGA Nvidia 8600GT. It has date codes of 0728 on parts. I guess after 17 years of service I can't complain.
Wow. What drivers are you using? My (newer) GTX 650 is not supported by current proprietary drivers.
I am thinking maybe I will try an AMD 7600 XT and see how that amdgpu driver in the kernel is doing these days. I haven't given AMD a chance in a very long time after all.
If you've been using a 2007 card, you probably haven't been asking much of it. Wouldn't the cheapest card you could find be good enough?
On Fri, Aug 09, 2024 at 05:01:11PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
What drivers are you using? My (newer) GTX 650 is not supported by current proprietary drivers.
nvidia-legacy-340xx
If you've been using a 2007 card, you probably haven't been asking much of it. Wouldn't the cheapest card you could find be good enough?
Well maybe I will try asking some more of it now that it sits next to my desk instead of in the basement. Besides I tend to buy midrange and then run it forever. :) The rest of the machine is slightly newer, more like 12 years old at this point I think. Motherboard I think is 2012 (Asus Sabertooth X79, which was released late 2011), 32GB ram, i7-3960X CPU, 36TB of spinning disks (9 x 4TB WD Red Pro in RAID6) and a pair of 500GB Samsung 860 SSDs in RAID1. It was overkill when I built it, and it is still running well so at this point the price per year of use is actually quite reasonable. I think a midrange modern GPU is OK for it. -- Len Sorensen
On Fri, Aug 09, 2024 at 11:23:22PM -0400, wrote:
Well maybe I will try asking some more of it now that it sits next to my desk instead of in the basement.
Besides I tend to buy midrange and then run it forever. :)
The rest of the machine is slightly newer, more like 12 years old at this point I think. Motherboard I think is 2012 (Asus Sabertooth X79, which was released late 2011), 32GB ram, i7-3960X CPU, 36TB of spinning disks (9 x 4TB WD Red Pro in RAID6) and a pair of 500GB Samsung 860 SSDs in RAID1. It was overkill when I built it, and it is still running well so at this point the price per year of use is actually quite reasonable. I think a midrange modern GPU is OK for it.
The 8600GT predated the machine and was not actually what I intended to put in it. I had a 660Ti card for it, except that ended up in my wife's machine after the 275GTX card decided to insinerate the voltage regulators. And then I never got around to getting a newer card put in the machine, and it ended up mainly doing server duty in the basement, and recording TV shows. It no longer does the TV recording since the rogers HD cable boxes no longer work now that everything has gone IP based with ignite. -- Len Sornesen
On Fri, 9 Aug 2024 15:14:34 -0400 Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
The video card is an EVGA Nvidia 8600GT. It has date codes of 0728 on parts. I guess after 17 years of service I can't complain.
I am thinking maybe I will try an AMD 7600 XT and see how that amdgpu driver in the kernel is doing these days. I haven't given AMD a chance in a very long time after all.
Lennart, I am running an AMD RX 6500 XT. It works fine, and I don't have to install NVIDIA software to make it run War Thunder. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On Fri, Aug 09, 2024 at 10:02:18PM -0400, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
I am running an AMD RX 6500 XT. It works fine, and I don't have to install NVIDIA software to make it run War Thunder.
That certainly sounds handy. I am difinitely curious to see the state of the amdgpu driver in the kernel these days. And maybe try out wayland and see what that new stuf is like. -- Len Sorensen
Lennart Sorensen via talk said on Fri, 9 Aug 2024 15:14:34 -0400
I am thinking maybe I will try an AMD 7600 XT and see how that amdgpu driver in the kernel is doing these days. I haven't given AMD a chance in a very long time after all.
AMD cards are much better for Linux than nVidia. There's a reason Linus gave the finger to nVidia. When first assembling the computer I'm typing this on, I had an nVidia card and had all sorts of intermittent weirdness including whole system hangs. I replaced it with a Radeon and the machine's been rock solid ever since. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com
On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 12:36 AM Steve Litt via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
AMD cards are much better for Linux than nVidia. There's a reason Linus gave the finger to nVidia. When first assembling the computer I'm typing this on, I had an nVidia card and had all sorts of intermittent weirdness including whole system hangs. I replaced it with a Radeon and the machine's been rock solid ever since.
I've used both reasonably current (ie, still being sold) green and red cards in my systems and the drivers are pretty stable for both. The nVidia support has improved greatly over the last few years. In my experience the difference is very usage-dependent. Any use of AI -- such as a local instance of Stable Diffusion or a TTS engine -- will be many MANY times better with nVidia. Many projects hosted at HuggingFace won't support AMD at all and will be CPU-bound if that's what you have. Gaming is specific to the game -- the proprietary AMD system includes tuning for many titles and if you play something on that list you're in luck. Otherwise not sure. Anything with ray tracing will certainly be inferior on AMD. Other apps that use the GPU directly like Handbrake and OBS generally support both (tho in my experience the Handbrake AMD support is not that great). If nothing of the above is an issue AMD GPUs are generally better value, sometimes significantly so. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56
On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 12:35:13AM -0400, Steve Litt via talk wrote:
AMD cards are much better for Linux than nVidia. There's a reason Linus gave the finger to nVidia. When first assembling the computer I'm typing this on, I had an nVidia card and had all sorts of intermittent weirdness including whole system hangs. I replaced it with a Radeon and the machine's been rock solid ever since.
Well I got one, put it in and it works without doing anything other than removing the nvidia driver. That's certainly a lot better than it used to be back when you had to use AMD's hinary drivers, which crashed X if you didn't explicitly set it to 24 bit color (the default was 256 color which the AMD drivers wouldn't do), and of course they were removing support from the drivers for cards that were a couple of years old that they were still selling to business customers. Never mind the windows 98 drivers that would loose the mouse pointer anytime you went to click a link in internet explorer. They promised to fix that in the next driver version, except they never released one. And the XP drivers that kept crashing the system. I guess they have gotten a bit better since. But it has been a lot of really bad work to get over. They have made good hardware, but wow their driver team has been terrible for a very long time. Maybe they finally got that part right too. -- Len Sorensen
On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 1:08 PM Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I guess they have gotten a bit better since. But it has been a lot of really bad work to get over. They have made good hardware, but wow their driver team has been terrible for a very long time. Maybe they finally got that part right too.
In this decade, focusing solely on OS hardware drivers is a mistake when evaluating current GPU offerings ... depending on your intended use. For gaming and video manipulation these are still a factor (and in general pretty solid for both companies, Wayland issues notwithstanding). If that's all you want, there are many good Internet sites that will help you find the current (and ever-changing) sweet spot that balances budget and performance. (Here's my favourite pricing site <https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/>, and a good at-a-glance comparison of benchmarks <https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html>.) However, nVidia hasn't become one of the world's most valuable companies because its cards run Davinci Resolve so well. GPUs these days are increasingly being used directly for apps from crypto mining to AI and beyond, to the point where some of the most expensive GPU cards are sold without display connectors. Increasingly, apps use direct access to GPUs using toolkits such as AMD's ROCm and nVidia's CUDA, and in this realm nVidia has a massive head start. AMD is making good progress, but if you're buying a card based on possible future AI and non-raster-video uses, it's still way behind. I have one system with an RX6600 and another with an RTX3060; they're pretty similar for day-to-day use but I have encountered many apps and platforms that just don't support AMD GPUs the way they do the nVideas ... if at all. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56
Evan Leibovitch via talk said on Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:47:04 -0400
On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 1:08 PM Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I guess they have gotten a bit better since. But it has been a lot of really bad work to get over. They have made good hardware, but wow their driver team has been terrible for a very long time. Maybe they finally got that part right too.
In this decade, focusing solely on OS hardware drivers is a mistake when evaluating current GPU offerings ... depending on your intended use.
Radeon makes their API available to Free Software authors. Nvidia does not, so sometimes you can't find a proprietary or FOSS driver that doesn't intermittently do bad things. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com
On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 5:09 PM Steve Litt via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Radeon makes their API available to Free Software authors. Nvidia does not
Are <https://developer.nvidia.com/rapids> you <https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/customize-generative-ai-models-for-enterprise-applications-with-llama-3-1> sure <https://developer.nvidia.com/tao-toolkit> about <https://developer.nvidia.com/cv-cuda> that <https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source>? - Evan
On Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 02:47:04PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
In this decade, focusing solely on OS hardware drivers is a mistake when evaluating current GPU offerings ... depending on your intended use.
If it can run X or wayland and maybe do openGl, I think it will do fine.
For gaming and video manipulation these are still a factor (and in general pretty solid for both companies, Wayland issues notwithstanding). If that's all you want, there are many good Internet sites that will help you find the current (and ever-changing) sweet spot that balances budget and performance. (Here's my favourite pricing site <https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/>, and a good at-a-glance comparison of benchmarks <https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html>.) However, nVidia hasn't become one of the world's most valuable companies because its cards run Davinci Resolve so well. GPUs these days are increasingly being used directly for apps from crypto mining to AI and beyond, to the point where some of the most expensive GPU cards are sold without display connectors.
Well crypto mining and AI are definitely things I don't care about at all. Not that I would have considered calling LLMs AI in the first place, but that seems to be the trendy thing to call it. It looks a lot like AI though so many people think it is much more than it really is. My gaming is currently on my laptop running windows, although the graphics is starting to have issues with a few newer things I have tried (the Quadro K2000M is perhaps getting a bit dated). Well not counting the gaming done on the switch or xbox one x. Or my phone I suppose. Maybe I should see which steam games will run under linux these days and see if any of that works on the other system.
Increasingly, apps use direct access to GPUs using toolkits such as AMD's ROCm and nVidia's CUDA, and in this realm nVidia has a massive head start. AMD is making good progress, but if you're buying a card based on possible future AI and non-raster-video uses, it's still way behind. I have one system with an RX6600 and another with an RTX3060; they're pretty similar for day-to-day use but I have encountered many apps and platforms that just don't support AMD GPUs the way they do the nVideas ... if at all.
Yes for some things Cuda is definitely used. Nothing I do. I don't do video editing. It's a busy year if I edit down one video to cut some pieces out of it. -- Len Sorensen
participants (6)
-
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Don Tai -
Evan Leibovitch -
Howard Gibson -
Lennart Sorensen -
Steve Litt