NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M

Written by Michael Larabel in Graphics Cards on 28 March 2008 at 11:30 AM EDT. Page 4 of 4. 3 Comments.

NVIDIA's Quadro NVS series is designed for business users looking for optimized performance with reliability, stability, and ease-of-use. NVIDIA has delivered a successful mobile GPU that should be able to meet most business user's needs with Quadro NVS 140M (G86M). The performance within the Compiz-enabled GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 8.04 was great, but we had run across some minor corruption issues and memory leaks -- though those are just current issues with NVIDIA's driver and not specific to the G86M. The Lenovo ThinkPad T61 had absolutely no problems when adding in extra Compiz effects (granted, this notebook is also using an Intel Penryn CPU). SPECViewPerf 9.0.3 had performed well with this notebook. Doom 3 and Quake 4 were easily playable on Linux with this mobile workstation GPU, but it did have a difficult time coping with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars at high quality settings.

While right now the only real option is using NVIDIA's binary-only display driver, there are open-source alternatives coming about -- the great work done in the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver and an expected NVIDIA open-source strategy. PowerMizer did have no troubles with the Quadro NVS 140M on the 169.12, which is great for extending your notebook's battery life and reducing the heat output.

If you're in the market for a new notebook with a lower-end dedicated graphics processor, the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M is a great candidate that will work well with Linux but will really require the use of NVIDIA's proprietary driver to take full advantage of its capabilities. For those with open-source support on their mind, Intel remains the best right now for mobile graphics capabilities on Linux with complete open-source 2D/3D support, while AMD is continuing to get there with their latest free software advancements.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.