The Best Graphics Card Brands For NVIDIA/AMD GPUs As A Linux Consumer?

[tancrackers]

I have the GTX-960M. I found it to be the best balance between bang for your buck, and performance.
I have a Sager NP7255 (Clevo 155RD)

[kaprikawn]

I tend to gravitate towards certain brands when it comes to motherboards, I trust Gigabyte mainly because I've had good experiences in the past. But when it comes to graphics cards, I decide which one I want, then buy the cheapest of that variant regardless of which company it comes from. I don't care what cooler it's got, or whether it's got a factory overclock or whatever. It's never seemed to be that important. The last time I needed a graphics card, I decided upon a 770 4GB after my research, put that into the Amazon search bar and got the cheapest. I honestly don't even know whose I got even now.

[Chewi]

I had an issue with one Sapphire card long ago (hd 4670): the fan was very bad quality/noisy, and I had to lower the gpu clocks to prevent overheat.
Once I changed the fan and it was ok.

I still have that very same card. It annoyed the crap out of me right from the start. I replaced it with a Zalman fanless heat sink and it was actually about 10°C cooler than the fan!

[omer666]

I know it is mostly useless, but I tend to basically buy the same brand as my motherboard, which happens to be ASUS. I don't look into it any further. Oh and it looks good when I open the case (completely useless and ridiculous)

[Thpn]

I always base hardware purchase decisions on reliability and Linux compatibility. Everyone here has the compatibility issue down. These are my sources for comparative data on hardware reliability:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/imprimer/944/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Most-Reliable-Hardware-of-2015-749/

http://www.pcmag.com/readers-choice/

[Kano]

Many cards just use the reference desigins, there should no be a huge difference between those. Some semi-passive cards have got certainly a modified vbios, but could not notice any problems for Kanotix users with those. I only had some incompatibilites with UEFI first settings in an older Asus Z68 board. Newer boards seem to init in pure UEFI GOP mode just fine - sometimes you can only disable CSM with onboard but will stay disabled with a compatible UEFI GOP card. Just don't boot 32 bit systems over 64 bit UEFI - that will lead to problems.

[trifud]

For workstation cards? SPECViewPerf is in there, but it's old.... OpenCL tests would probably be most interesting then like:

phoronix-test-suite benchmark luxmark juliagpu smallpt-gpu shoc clpeak

Or for some normal OpenGL tests for fun:

phoronix-test-suite benchmark tesseract xonotic gputest

This is AMD FirePro W8000 - the second most powerful GPU from the previous FiroPro family: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/...HA-UBUNTU16003

I will do some more benchmarks with other GPUs later on.

[Adarion]

I think there are differences between the board manufactureres. They do use the same GPU chips in the end, yes, but there are differences in board layout, memory used, amount of memory, capacitors, cooling system and maybe also in some VGA BIOS or default settings (some overclock). There are probably enough quirks, especially in the field of mobile chips, needed in the kernel.
I have relatively little comparison, though.
Let aside my older cards (486 times...) it was some ASUS Geforce 3. HW was okay, but horrible software (as always) from Asus (W98 times on Athlon C and later Athlon XP, but the card also saw Linux kernels). Later I was running some onboard Radeon Xpress 1250 (?), a HD 3300 (onboard, both Asus) and following a Radeon HD 3870 from Sapphire; passive cooling (used free stack and fglrx). I stayed with Sapphire since then for my dedicated GPUs since someone said somewhere that Sapphire stays closest to AMD's reference designs - which is normally a good thing and should keep compatibility. Currently I run a Sapphire HD 5670 and I'm very fine with it (free stack only for some years now on the Linux side). The Kabini chips are "Biostar" (soldered E1-2100, but as a SOC it's basically AMD tech directly) and an Athlon 5350 (Socket AM1) but that's also AMD. Also my HP 635 notebook with an E-350 should be AMD directly, regardless who made the very board (Quanta or something likely).
I'll check the market again once I have money and hopefully by then Polaris will be around.

There have been a few fails on certain boards in the past with GPU chips that were actually fine - but the board manufacturer maybe messed something up in wiring, capacitors, improper cooling system or power supply. Well, an Nvidia's mobile blowups, but that was actually Nvidia's fault (and they knew it and still sold the defective units).

Also support is a topic in regard of differences. Try to talk to enterprises if you have a tech issue / question. Some will ignore you, some will try to fob you off asap with their "support personnel (outsourced people that work for a different company every second week and that doesn't have a clue about anything but copy / paste sentences from a FAQ). A few will actually give you some solid answers.

E.g. I had a very nice and positive response from Zotac. I was totally blown that the guy even found out about the type of BIOS flash chip that was used on a miniITX board of them. Some others suspected that I was one of those Linux-guys when I asked them about the SuperIO / EC on a mainboard or laptop, but didn't have a clue which one was used (you would think somebody knew what they are selling...) or some even wrote kind of "why would anybody want to know about a superIO".

But this may vary from person to person you talk / write to.

[bug77]

...
Also support is a topic in regard of differences. Try to talk to enterprises if you have a tech issue / question. Some will ignore you, some will try to fob you off asap with their "support personnel (outsourced people that work for a different company every second week and that doesn't have a clue about anything but copy / paste sentences from a FAQ). A few will actually give you some solid answers.

E.g. I had a very nice and positive response from Zotac. I was totally blown that the guy even found out about the type of BIOS flash chip that was used on a miniITX board of them. Some others suspected that I was one of those Linux-guys when I asked them about the SuperIO / EC on a mainboard or laptop, but didn't have a clue which one was used (you would think somebody knew what they are selling...) or some even wrote kind of "why would anybody want to know about a superIO".

But this may vary from person to person you talk / write to.

Exactly the reason MSI is not on my list anymore. The one time I needed some help from them, they have replied late and the answer was actually a few lines from the manual.
When I needed help from Abit, they apologized for being unable to source the same memory I had to try to reproduce my problem (they were still helpful).

Yet Abit is gone today, while MSI is very much alive. Probably proper customer support is detrimental to business.

[shess01]

All things considered, what will matter most is the manufacturers warranty. Recently my MSI 7870 failed at just shy of 3 years (1 yr warranty) . In selecting my replacement parts for what turned into a new build, I exclusively bought ASUS and Gigabyte - both with 3 year warranties.
Just my 2 cents.