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

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 7 June 2014 at 04:35 AM EDT. Page 1 of 8. 5 Comments.

NVIDIA recently began shipping their TITAN Z graphics card that sports two unlocked GK110 GPU cores and 12GB of video memory, but for those that can't afford this $2,999 USD graphics card, on the opposite end they also began shipping a new budget graphics card: the GeForce GT 740. At Phoronix today we are seeing how well the EVGA GeForce GT 740 Super Clocked graphics card compares to many other NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards under Linux. There's also a number of AMD/NVIDIA Linux performance-per-Watt metrics, GPU thermal data, etc, in this latest Linux graphics card review.

The GeForce GT 740 was announced at the end of May with a Kepler-based GK107 graphics core, 1GB+ of video memory, 993MHz base clock frequency, 5000MHz GDDR5 video memory clock frequency, 64 Watt TDP, 384 CUDA cores, and pricing that starts out at $89 USD. The GeForce GT 740 was launched months after the very interesting GeForce GTX 750 series that introduced the Maxwell architecture to succeed Kepler and is showing much promise for Linux gamers and other desktop users.

The EVGA GeForce GT 740 being tested at Phoronix today is their 01G-P4-3743-KR model that is "super clocked" with a base frequency of 1085MHz (compared to 993MHz default) while retaining the 5000MHz base frequency for its 1GB GDDR5 video memory. The EVGA GeForce GT 740 01G-P4-3743-KR is currently retailing for just a few dollars more than the base pricing of $89 USD. EVGA is also selling other variants of the GeForce GT 740 that currently consist of versions with up to 4GB of GDD5 memory, "FTW" editions to complement the "Superclocked" versions, and four versions of the GT 740 with using DDR3 video memory.

The EVGA GeForce GT 740 graphics card came along with the Windows driver CD, two 4-pin molex connector to 6-pin PCI-E power adapter, and a VGA D-Sub to DVI adapter. EVGA graphics cards now come with a warning that graphics cards are hot and you should allow two minutes after operating the system before touching the graphics card... There's no mention of Linux support on EVGA's packaging, but that's the norm among NVIDIA's AIB partners, and this card should work regardless using the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver or even the Nouveau open-source driver.


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