upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

Snarkout · 2012-01-21 20:09:19

Hi folks,

I have an old 8400 GS which doesn't play well with the new nvidia drivers, and since 3.2, the new nvidia drivers are a must (I've never gotten nouveau running well) , so I guess it's time to upgrade. I don't game or need anything spectacular, so I'm looking at the cheapo options - GT430 or GT520 currently. Opinions/experiences?

ratcheer · 2012-01-22 01:01:37

I have a GT430 in one of my old PC's. When I was using it, it was great. A huge improvement over the 9400GT I had been using.

I cannot claim it is great, but it's agood card. I paid about $60 for it about a year ago.

Tim

Snarkout · 2012-01-22 16:46:37

Thanks! "Works w/ current drivers w/o freezing or blackscreening" is much more important than "great" to me. The 8400 does both of those with the 290 drivers, even with effects turned off in KDE.

graysky · 2012-01-22 17:11:32

I have a GTS450 and works great with the propitiatory nvidia drivers. Are you sure your 8400GS is the problem? I too have this card in another box and it runs just fine with 290.10

Snarkout · 2012-01-22 18:01:43

graysky wrote:

I have a GTS450 and works great with the propitiatory nvidia drivers. Are you sure your 8400GS is the problem? I too have this card in another box and it runs just fine with 290.10

No, I'm not sure, but there are no issues at all with 285.05.09 and with 290.10 starting firefox or thunderbird or virtualbox or gns3 results in a 30+ second freeze and possibly a blackscreen that requires restarting KDM to recover from. I have similar issues when going to system settings => desktop effects. Starting, say, grip or acidrip doesn't cause the issue. I troubleshot this a bunch back when the 290.10 drivers first came out (IIRC, I removed all GTK-qt and GTK-kde packages and turned off all desktop effects, and added a few different xorg options, but nothing made any difference) and minimally yesterday after I upgraded everything on my box to troubleshoot another issue I was having, but turning off KDE effects didn't resolve anything.

I had a number of "real world" things I needed to do yesterday, and the constant freezing was causing me a massive number of problems. I eventually switched to my lappy to get my work done. If I can throw $60 at the problem to make it go away, that's more than a bargain, but you make a good point - if I throw $60 and it doesn't go away, I'll be bummed. If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears.

I have some time today, so I'm going to try upgrading again and see if I can find anything, I'll update this thread if I do.

Gusar · 2012-01-22 18:56:01

Nvidia has a "long-lived branch" now, a sort of extra-stable driver. The current one is 275.43. Try that.

Snarkout · 2012-01-22 19:12:52

When I updated kernel and kernel-lts yesterday it made me upgrade nvidia to 290.10 - I'll see what I can get done with a PKGBUILD.

All I see anywhere of any interest when launching firefox is the following in Xorg.0.log:

[    50.710] (WW) NVIDIA(0): WAIT (2, 6, 0x8000, 0x00008e5c, 0x0000924c)
[    51.698] (WW) NVIDIA(0): WAIT (0, 6, 0x8000, 0x0000924c, 0x0000924c)
[   544.915] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Error recovery failed.
[   544.915] (EE) NVIDIA(0):  *** Aborting ***
[   547.969] (WW) NVIDIA(0): WAIT (2, 6, 0x8000, 0x000077e4, 0x0000aaf0)
[   549.018] (WW) NVIDIA(0): WAIT (0, 6, 0x8000, 0x0000aaf0, 0x0000aaf0)

Sometimes only the wait lines appear, other times I get the error. Creating a new user with all default settings and disabling effects in kde doesn't change anything. Strangely, effects work just fine, but going to the kde desktop effects config screen causes a freeze.

Last edited by Snarkout (2012-01-22 19:39:11)

Snarkout · 2012-01-22 19:38:47

At this point, the list of things that seem to cause freezing is pretty slim:

open firefox
open thunderbird
open virtualbox
open kde desktop effects

GNS3 doesn't cause the issue any longer, but that may be because I'm running stable instead of beta (with virtualbox support) at this point - downgraded yesterday. Anyone have any idea what these apps have in common? I can't figure it out.

Snarkout · 2012-01-22 20:05:46

Gusar wrote:

Nvidia has a "long-lived branch" now, a sort of extra-stable driver. The current one is 275.43. Try that.

OK, the nvidia-275xx and nvidia-utils-275xx packages from the AUR seem to work fine. I'll shelf this issue until it crops up yet again, I guess. Especially in light of the fact that apparently it's possibly *not* an issue with my card. Thanks everyone for the help!

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-21 20:09:19

upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

#2 2012-01-22 01:01:37

Re: upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

#3 2012-01-22 16:46:37

Re: upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

#4 2012-01-22 17:11:32

Re: upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

#5 2012-01-22 18:01:43

Re: upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

#6 2012-01-22 18:56:01

Re: upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

#7 2012-01-22 19:12:52

Re: upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

#8 2012-01-22 19:38:47

Re: upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

#9 2012-01-22 20:05:46

Re: upgrade from geforce 8400 GS?

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