[LAU] Video card for audio (silent, low latency etc)

[david]

On 3/28/20 11:43 PM, Ben Bell wrote:
> Apologies for this being only tangentially on-topic, but has anyone got a
> recommendation for a decent video card for driving a 4K monitor under
> Linux?
>
> The audio connection here is that I'm looking for something that is passively
> cooled (or at very quiet if not), performs well, and is low-latency friendly
> (so probably not proprietary drivers)? With those requirements I don't
> really fancy my chances in the "google, buy and hope" approach.
>
> I've been using cheap nvidias with nouveau for a while but performance of
> certain operations (scrolling, dragging/resizing windows) is painfully slow,
> particularly since I made the jump to a 4K monitor.
>
> Has anyone got some success stories?
>
> bjb

I don't know how helpful this will be to you, but I have a Dell laptop 
(XPS 15 7590) with 4K HDR OLED display. For video hardware, it includes 
both Intel HD Graphics 630 hardware and an NVidia GTX 1650 with 4GB of 
GDDR5.

I've never used the NVidia side at all, just the Intel HD that's 
supported out of the box with Debian. I'm also running an RT kernel and 
audio setup.

I've never experienced the performance issues you mention above.

Those issue do sound familiar, though. My wife had a netbook with 2GB of 
RAM and some onboard Intel hardware with shared system memory for 
handling the display. It handled the built-in 1280x800 display with no 
problems. But when connected to an external 1920x1080 monitor, those 
kinds of issues would happen. I think it was simply because it forced 
the video hardware to use more shared memory and that affected the rest 
of the system.

My laptop's Intel hardware has driven 4K HDR videos full screen in the 
background while I'm going other things with it. So you might see if 
getting something like that would be sufficient.

That might mean a motherboard replacement. I don't know if the Intel HD 
630 is available as a standalone video card.

As far as cooling noises go... I've never heard a fan sound from my 
laptop. It seems to have some kind of passive cooling system going. But 
Hawaii is a warmer place than most of the United States. Right now the 
CPU's at 129F, running at 900MHz. When the CPU really cranks up - all 8 
cores/16 threads running all out - it hits over 200F at 4.2GHz. I've 
never seen it hit its nominal 5GHz. I have it sitting on a laptop cooler 
that seems to keep it under control.

So, anyway, I think an Intel HD 630 would do what you want without any 
problems.

Hope that helps!

-- 
David W. Jones
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
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http://dancingtreefrog.com
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