NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti "Maxwell": A Great Mid-Range GPU For Linux Users

Now having an idea for the performer that the GTX 750 Ti "Maxwell" is, to look at next are the thermal and power consumption results... The AC power consumption was measured for the system overall using a WattsUp power meter that interfaces with the system via USB and is automatically polled via the Phoronix Test Suite when setting the MONITOR=sys.power environment variable and additionally setting the PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 environment variable will have the Phoronix Test Suite automatically generate extra graphs showing the performance-per-Watt.

The GPU core temperature was monitored automatically as well via the Phoronix Test Suite with the exposed interfaces provided by the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers when setting the MONITOR=gpu.temp environment variable for our benchmarking software.

Rather than testing all 21 graphics cards for these results and leading to an information overload, the selection of GPUs was trimmed down to the ten most relevant AMD and NVIDIA GPUs for this Maxwell launch article.

The GPUs showed for this part of the testing were on the AMD side the Radeon R7 260X, R7 270X, and R9 290. On the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GT 520, GTX 550 Ti, GTX 650, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 760, GTX 770, and GTX 780 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 750 Ti had an average operating temperature while running Unigine Valley of 61.9 Celsius, which isn't bad given that Valley is one of the most demanding OpenGL Linux benchmarks available. The GTX 750 Ti was also running cooler than the GeForce GTX 760 at 78.5 Celsius or the GeForce GTX 550 Ti at 65 Celsius, but not as cool as the MSI GeForce GTX 650.

The system power consumption for the entire system on the AC end when running Unigine Valley averaged out to 140 Watts, which is well below the GeForce GTX 550 Ti at 191 Watts or the Radeon R7 260X with a system power use of 148 Watts.

When factoring in the Unigine Valley performance numbers and the system power consumption, we have the auto-generated performance-per-Watt data. Of the low and mid-range graphics cards tested, the GTX 750 Ti Maxwell easily delivered the best performance-per-Watt. The GeForce GTX 750 Ti running on Ubuntu Linux delivered 2.75x better performance-per-Watt over the GeForce GTX 550 Ti or going to the low-end GeForce GT 520 Fermi it ended up being more than seven times better performance-per-Watt. The GTX 750 Ti also did well against the GTX 650 and R7 260X while even topping out over the GTX 760. The high-end GeForce GTX 770 and GTX 780 Ti had slightly better performance-per-Watt, but it will be interesting to see how the performance is when we get high-end Maxwell GPUs out of NVIDIA.