ASUS Releases Graphics Card That Could Actually Be Great For Open-Source NVIDIA Fans

ASUS has released a new budget graphics card that could actually be great for those wanting to use the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver stack on Linux.

ASUS' newest offering is the GT710-4H-SL-2GD5, yes, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 based graphics card... The GT 710 debuted back in January 2016 and based on the Kepler architecture. While several generations old, this low-end, low-priced graphics card actually is a win for those Nouveau users with Kepler currently being the last NVIDIA GPU generation with good open-source support: no firmware binaries are needed for hardware initialization and Kepler GPUs can re-clock to their optimal clock frequencies, albeit re-clocking to the optimal performance state needs to be done manually via the command-line. But Kepler (and GTX 750 Maxwell) are currently the "best" supported open-source NVIDIA GPUs by the Nouveau driver and the last of the graphics cards not requiring any proprietary firmware/microcode (AMD graphics cards on their open-source driver also require closed-source microcode).

So having a revived Kepler-based graphics card is actually interesting for open-source purists... But the other updates to the ASUS GT710-4H-SL-2GD5 also make it nice: it's passively cooled and there are four HDMI outputs for the card. Sure, some may prefer DisplayPort, but having four outputs on such a low-end card is nice.

Or for those wanting to use the NVIDIA proprietary Linux driver, this could make for a nice HTPC type graphics card with VDPAU and NVENC/NVDEC support.

At ~$50 USD, this isn't a bad low-end graphics card for those wanting something actually quite open-source friendly while being passively cooled and four HDMI outputs. All the specs on this card at ASUS.com.