Continuing on from last week's post, while I wanted to track down an MSI GTX970 to try it out, local suppliers were completely out of stock of that card. And then MSY had a 10% off Gigabyte products sale, so...long story short I got a Gigabyte GTX970 G1 Gaming.
The GTX970 G1 Gaming
Couple of points of note for anyone thinking of getting one:
- The specs say the length is 312mm, but I think this includes both the frame and perhaps a little leeway. I measured 298mm from the inside of the frame to the end, so it might fit in cases where the specs say it shouldn't. Viewer discretion advised.
- Requires 1x8-pin and 1x6-pin power connectors.
- I've run it with the Power-Mate Lite for over a week — on the i7-4790K (stock) system the maximum power draw was 316W while gaming.
On the Windows side there were no issues of note compared to the last one I installed, but on Linux it was a different story.
I had a Kubuntu 14.04 install on the same machine with Windows 8.1, which was working perfectly with Intel graphics. After plugging in the GTX970, the Linux install refused to boot. Using "text" or "text nomodeset" override options in grub showed it was hanging at random places during the boot process. Even a live distro off USB failed to get a display. While running off onboard I installed the nvidia-current drivers, which didn't help.
The solution turned out to be installing the latest xorg-edger drivers. The process is described in this forum post by Kade7596, but the brief summary is:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-346
Normally I would run "nvidia-xconfig" after installing the drivers, but the 346 drivers don't seem to include this application any more. Since I'd already run it using the older drivers from the Ubuntu nvidia-current target, I had a default xorg.conf written. Not sure if it was necessary.
After installing nvidia-346 the GTX970 now works.
In closing, the G1 Gaming also glows in the dark...
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