NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 On Linux

This week I featured the first Linux review of an AMD Radeon Rx 200 series graphics card in the form of an AMD Radeon R9 270X "Curacao XT" benchmarked on Ubuntu. If you're looking to buy a new graphics card for use on the Linux desktop but prefer NVIDIA hardware or buying a GPU isn't dependent upon the incomplete RadeonSI driver, being looked at today on Phoronix is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Kepler graphics card.

The GeForce GTX 650 has been on the market since late last year so the open and closed-source Linux GPU driver support is both maturing -- sans Nouveau's lack of re-clocking for Fermi/Kepler hardware at the moment -- and prices on this GK107 graphics card have been lowered as well. At the moment, the GeForce GTX 650 graphics cards can be bought retail for around $100 USD. For those looking into a low/mid-range graphics card on Linux, the GeForce GTX 650 has the potential to be very interesting.

The GK107 GPU core like the other Keplers is fabbed at a 28nm process and supports PCI Express 3.0 x16. The GTX 650 is clocked at 1058MHz without any boost frequencies and the video memory is set to run at 5000MHz. There are 384 CUDA cores to this graphics processor. The GeForce GTX 650 retails in 1GB and 2GB GDDR5 varieties and the TDP on the graphics card is 64 Watts.

The graphics card I am testing today is the MSI N650-1GD5/OC GeForce GTX 650. This MSI graphics card retails for $99 USD and features 1GB of 128-bit GDDR5 video memory, a 1084MHz core clock (slightly above NVIDIA's reference frequency), and 5000MHz video memory clock speed. Included with the MSI GeForce GTX 650 were a quick user's guide, a GTX 650 series MSI pamphlet, a Windows driver and utility CD, one 4-pin molex to 6-pin PCI Express power adapter, one VGA to DVI dongle, and the PCI Express 3.0 graphics card itself.