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

[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!

[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.

[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)

[bug77]

For Linux users, is there a particular brand preference for graphics cards?

All brands suck as long as Linux support is concerned.
None of them writes Linux utilities as they do for Windows (afaik), whatever software support we get comes from Nvidia, AMD, Intel or Mesa developers.
I think it's worth noting that in the past years manufacturers seem to have become more strict when it comes to cards design, so today a vast majority of the cards released are reference designs so it barely makes a difference which manufacturer you choose, regardless of your OS choice. Most differences come from custom cooling solutions (which are important imho) and binning that yield different factory overclock levels.

[buzzrobot]

It would be useful for someone to publish a list of Nvidia cards that are known not to work with Nouveau, or work so poorly as to be effectively useless, perhaps correlated with kernel version.

This would be a service, especially to people running Ubuntu, Ubuntu derivatives, and others with an "Additional Drivers" type of tool. These depend on their ability to detect the active card. That requires users to boot using that card. Nouveau will be used by default at that point. For a disappointingly large number of cards, the machine will boot into a black screen. (Typically, as I understand, X will crash on launch.)

The usual suggestion to people victimized by this is to use 'nomodeset", then install a proprietary driver. Users, though, especially new users, should not need to take the risk of editing kernel boot parameters.

[pipe13]

I bought an Nvidia GeForce 960 GTX last summer specifically for Cuda programming. The choice came down to heatsink-cooling, specifically the footprint of the cooling tubes.

My "workstation" is a four-year-old SFF Shuttle SH67H3, advertised as fitting full-sized graphics cards. I first tried an MSI 960 GTX based on reviews of cooling and noise. But it wouldn't fit -- the cooling pipes bulged above the top of the board just enough that it wouldn't clear a frame rail. Exchanged for an EVGA 960 GTX, which slid in no problem.

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with Linux, or even the MSI card itself in even a slightly larger case. Just that the EVGA card is built to size spec, and is essentially silent except when under heavy load, where it is noticeable but tolerable. The MSI card may or may not do better, I wouldn't know.

[artivision]

Nvidia GPUs don't have Async_Compute = obsolete for all OSs. Anyway it's all about the use. If you are OK with the number of Linux OGL gaming titles then Nvidia. If you are not then AMD + Gallium_Nine and hope for Vulkan.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&LH_ItemCondition=3&_sop=15&LH_BIN=1&_nkw=radeon%20380&rt=nc&_mPrRngCbx=1&_udlo=100&_udhi

[mannerov]

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.

With my last MSI card (which I checked on phoronix had the functionnality that stops fan when not needed working on Linux as well), it is wonders ! MSI 380 gaming 4G.

[GraysonPeddie]

I have Gigabyte GTX 960 4GB Mini and it is working very well so far.

[Michael]

I administrate about 20 workstations running different flavors of Linux and a mixture of AMD and NVIDIA professional GPUs and I haven't seen a noticeable difference regarding compatibility. I have had some issues with FirePro drivers on RHEL7 but the problem has always been with RHEL and not with AMD. Actually, RHEL has always been troublesome in many different ways in our setup. I wonder how people can pay money for this trash. Regarding performance, I haven't benchmarked the systems. I haven't either noticed any difference in stability of drivers. If you can suggest what Phoronix tests to run on these, I may provide some statistics.

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