<div dir="auto"><div>Many consumer graphics cards purchase a graphics chip from a big maker like NVidia and make their own board for it. So unless the chip and board are made by NVidia, there's culpability to spread around.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Hardware does fail. But swearing off of all Ford cars because one was a lemon is a bit extreme. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Running large clusters with hundreds to thousands of NVidia GPUs shows the high end devices to be rather sturdy as long at heat is removed as required. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">The consumer ones I've personally used have all been found to be heat problems or a driver bug of a desktop environment bug.</div><div><br></div><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">-- <br>James P. Kinney III<br><i><i><i><i><br></i></i></i></i>Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you
gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his
own tail. It won't fatten the dog.<br>
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain<br><i><i><i><i><br><a href="http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/</a><br></i></i></i></i></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Sep 15, 2025, 10:47 AM DJPfulio--- via Ale <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org">ale@ale.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On 9/15/25 10:06, James Taylor via Ale wrote:<br>
> "All I can tell you about the preceding is I wouldn't be caught dead <br>
> using an nVidia video card or GPU or whatever it's called with<br>
> Linux. That's playing Russian Roulette with intermittent freezes and <br>
> spontaneous reboots. This doesn't happen to most people, but it's a <br>
> well known problem and it happened to me. And when it does, it takes <br>
> hours and hours to troubleshoot because nobody suspects a bad video <br>
> card would take down a whole machine."<br>
> <br>
> That's odd. I've been sourcing nothing but nvidia cards for my<br>
> linux boxes for over a decade, with no issues other than usual self-<br>
> inflicted ones.<br>
> <br>
> I've been running exclusively openSUSE, so maybe better support on<br>
> that distro?<br>
> <br>
<br>
I used nVidia for a long time. Then had one of their cards fail and the failure looked like the CPU+Motherboard had been destroyed. It was just the GPU, but it left me a little shocked that something like that which should have just caused the MB to do the "Bad GPU" beeps, didn't.<br>
<br>
Bought a low-end replacement nVidia, just newer. Used it for about 5 yrs, then after an OS upgrade, it stopped working except at 768p resolution. Previously, it was working at 1920x1200. Seems nvidia decided to drop support and I was stuck using the F/LOSS drivers, which would have been fine, if my desired resolution worked. That old nVidia GPU will probably work fine today with the resolution I want.<br>
<br>
Anyway, when the proprietary drivers weren't rebuilt for the new kernel (which was 2+ yrs old FWIW), I foolishly got another low-end nVidia GPU. At the time, nVidia made loading their drivers a hassle, but eventually I got it working. This was at the height of the "can't pay us enough to make GPUs" period. Since it was a relatively cheap DDR5 GT 1030 card, nvidia has little reason to do any support for it. Upgraded from a Core i5 CPU to a Ryzen 5 and took the GT 1030 with me. It was never as stable as I expected - not terrible, just I don't consider any GPU related issue to be good. A few years later, I moved to a newer Ryzen 5600G where the integrated GPU is faster than the GT 1030. It used 50% less power (CPU+GPU) and performed better. Pulled the nVidia and haven't had any stability issues since then. 2 yrs later, I replaced an older, slower, Intel Pentium G system with the same Ryzen 5600G and MB I was so pleased with the other box. Basically, have 2 almost identical deskt<br>
ops that can run 100% of my VM and container workloads on either system alone. Only the NIC setup and connected storage is slightly different.<br>
<br>
Sure, sometimes I'd like to have a little more powerful AMD GPU, but not enough to spend $80 for a used version and certainly not enough to spend more for something new. My needs are basic graphics, sometimes, with some media playback. Zero gaming. I played with using the iGPU for encoding video in hardware, but the results weren't very good even when I relaxed the file size to be 10x larger than the source. Instead, to get smaller files with no noticeable artifacts, I use handbrake. If I'm willing to have a few artifacts (watch once stuff), then I'll use ffmpeg software with h.264 video encoding, since that will often reduce the file size 50%, though not always. My playback devices work best with h.264 videos and specific h.265 settings,<br>
<br>
They hate google vp9 videos. The audio and video get farther and farther out of sync with vp9 until within less than a minute, it is unwatchable because it is already 10 seconds diverged.<br>
<br>
Anyway, I came up with a rule for GPUs. Get the AMD GPU unless you are spending over $1200, then you want the nVidia GPUs with all the problems those bring. AMD GPUs, in the mid-cost and low-end, remove so many hassles since their drivers are part of the kernel now, that it just doesn't make sense to bother with nvidia anymore outside high-end GPUs. Clearly, if you want to play with LLM stuff, you'll need a $1200-$2000 nvidia GPU anyway.<br>
<br>
And for laptops, I choose Intel-based GPUs with iGPUs built-in. Those have been good enough and the power management with Intel is predictable. Laptops usually become useless after 3-5 yrs of use for me, so the idea of having 10 yrs of use from an older GPU on a laptop has never been an issue. Plus, my last 2 laptops were less than $320 and just 1-2 generations behind the midrange CPU shipped "new" at the time. I can't see spending even $500 on a laptop, unless it wasn't my money. The way I see it, if I need 1 $1200 laptop every decade or (3) $250 (or less) laptops every decade, at least with the cheaper versions, I get faster performance, more RAM, faster wifi/networking, larger SSD, newer batteries every few years, for 75% of the cost.<br>
<br>
Of course, others will have different priorities, which is fine. I'm rockin' a Dell 13.3inch Latitude with an 11th Gen Core i5 now. Great laptop for less than $260 refurbed directly from Dell, dude. No AMD/nvidia GPU in that laptop and I don't recall the last time I used wifi with it, but it has Intel wifi chips.<br>
<br>
YMMV, of course.<br>
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</blockquote></div>