eVGA GeForce GTX 750 "Maxwell" On Ubuntu Linux

Read my earlier NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti Linux review for all of my NVIDIA Maxwell thoughts at length as it pertains to Linux users and my large power performance comparison that takes a look at NVIDIA's mid-range power efficiency from the GM107 graphics card all the way back to the GeForce 6 series. Long story short though with the eVGA GeForce GTX 750, it was very successful in delivering superior performance to its previous-generation mid-range Fermi and Kepler GPUs while drawing less power. For those in the market for a $100~150 USD graphics card, the GTX 750 series is a winner.

If you can afford the ~$30 extra, of course I would recommend going for the slightly more powerful GTX 750 Ti that also has 2GB of GDDR5 video memory, but the GTX 750 (non-Ti) is not a bad deal either. For $120 USD the eVGA GeForce GTX 750 was running well on Linux with the 334 series proprietary driver. Besides being a huge upgrade over the GTX 550 Ti and GTX 650, the GTX 750 was running great against the similarly priced Radeon R7 260X and in some rare cases even winning against the more expensive Radeon R9 270X, thanks to AMD's Catalyst Linux driver not always being in tip-top shape. When it comes to the power efficiency / performance-per-Watt, NVIDIA's Maxwell easily blows past AMD's current line-up.

As mentioned several times already, the only Linux fault I have with NVIDIA over their Maxwell support is still no overclocking support offered via their Linux binary driver since the Fermi days. In terms of open-source support, there is no support yet for Maxwell within Nouveau but it's coming. If you are a casual gamer, need a semi-powerful GPU for a HTPC / living room PC, or just want an energy-efficient graphics card that should be future-proof for a while, the GeForce GTX 750 is a nice bargain at about $120 USD.

If you wish to see how these graphics cards compare to your own system, it's as easy as installing the Phoronix Test Suite on the Linux distribution of your choice then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1402270-PL-GTX750NVI32. If you wish to run the GPU temp and thermal comparison with MONITOR=gpu.temp,sys.power PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 set as environment variables then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1402273-PL-SENSORMON03. It's that easy for conducting your own fully-automated side-by-side Linux comparison against these Phoronix results. Additional data is available via OpenBenchmarking.org.