For those having recently bought Optimus enabled IvyBridge/Haswell laptops, having trouble to install Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution (especially with the video):
Pass the kernel flag video.use_bios_initial_backlight=0 if the kernel appears to crash on boot. The flag nomodeset also fixes the apparent crash, but then you can’t use the Intel video driver. What really happens is that on some laptop models the kernel turns the LED backlight off and you can’t see anything on screen.
Also: Ubuntu 12.04 offers packages named linux-kernel-generic-lts-raring and xserver-xorg-lts-raring with the latest hardware enablement stack (specifically needed for Haswell integrated graphics, for example).
Also: an updated Ubuntu 12.04.3 will be out soon, it improves the secure boot compatibility as well.
Cool. I noticed there is a great deal on an HP Envy TS 15t-j100 with a 15.6" 1920x1080 touchscreen, a fairly beefy Core i7 Haswell and 16GB. Pretty sure it’s a GK208. Was tempted!
Pretty decent. There’s also a configurable version as well, although not as much bang for the buck, but can be configured with backlit keyboard with 4200U CPU for <$800. Link. Many cashback portals offer 5% off HP right now also.
Another GT630 card has appeared. This one has double Displayport ports and one DVI. It’s like $97 online. Perhaps it’s old and I never spotted it?
I’m guessing it’s not a GK208 because it has a 128-bit bus, 25 GB/sec and PCIe 3.0 x16. It sounds like it’s a Quadro NVS 510 variant. If so, then it only has one SMX and 192 cores.
Still, three digital ports is a nice feature. It would be nice to know what the real specs are on this card.
FYI, the GT 635 is an sm_35/GK208 OEM card that has started to appear on eBay. It’s sold with Dell workstations and often pulled and replaced with a higher end card immediately after purchase.
I got one from eBay for $45 and am testing it on a low-power Mini-ITX board that happens to have a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot. Seems to work fine. :)
According to GPU-Z, the GT 635 is a 1GB GK208 with x8 lanes (PCIe 3.0, I think) and clocked slightly higher than the retail GT 630 GK208:
I had some eBay bucks to burn and got one as well. It is slimmer than the Zotac, (1-slot) with a small active fan, rather than a passive heatsink.
I also noticed that unlike the previous Zotac 2GB GK208 GT 630, this card will scale the display output full width over HDMI when using a 2560x1080 monitor, the Zotac did not. This might be a good thing because I had been running into a weird issue (using an HDMI IoGear KVM) where when the display woke up from sleep, all my windows would move towards the edge of the screen as if a resolution change to a 4:3 format had occured… perhaps it was related to that… I shall see.
Edit: The issue I’m having is probably related to the HDMI KVM I have, as it still occurs after the card change.
Hm, could be, although I think my issue is related to the KVM I have since it still happened. Nice catch. I attached a copy of the GT 635 80.28.4C.00.01 (P2130-0003) BIOS in case you’re interested. GK208.rom.txt (161 KB)
The “–version” dump of the two ROMs shows that yours was built on 8/27/13 and mine was 3/29/13. Every device attribute matched so I went ahead and successfully flashed it.
For a list of available cards in the Netherlands, see the Tweakers.net pricewatch (filtered for GT 630 with >=2GB).
The Asus GT630-SL-2GD3-L seems to be well available here, probably one of the shops will also ship outside the Netherlands.
So I will be gettingh a GV-N630D3-2GL. The problem with nVidia’s product relabeling is that most price search engine will show item description from previous iterations of the product, EVEN if the part has different specs because it is a newer revision
I hate it when nVidia does that: Recently I got a GTX 660 OEM part, and guess what: It’s a Fermi part with Compute 2.1. Who would have thought.
Hello, thank you for putting up all the information on gk208´s
I would like to ask if one of you knows, or tested the double precision FLOPS of an gk208 (either 640 or 630) (ddr5 if possible). I could not find a hard fact about it on the web, people are just speaking about multipliers of 1/24 or 1/8 but i would like to know from a good source.
An interpretation of the GK208’s 14x ratio is that the peak theoretical FP32 result is ~700 GFLOPS and 1/24th of that is exactly the observed FP64 throughput. That is, the theoretical FP64 limit is easily achieved.
Other discussions on this forum have blamed register bank conflicts for the inability to easily reach the theoretical FP32 limit.
I get 2055 fp32, 1165 fp64 for the Tesla K20c, and 1992 fp32 142 f64 for the GTX 680 on Win 7 using Cuda-Z.
Was testing out a GTX 780 ti the other day and wow! The Cuda-z was 3900 fp32 and around 360 for fp64.
What was most impressive was the 1100 Giops of the GTX 780 ti, which is almost about twice what I get from the K20c (586 Giops)
Since I have been writing a great deal of code which mainly uses integers, I am now drooling over the GTX 780 ti. But since much of it is using 64 bit numbers, not sure how much of a speed-up I will get running that code on the GTX 780 ti.
Seems like there are at least 2 (small/medium-factor) laptops available now with Maxwell. They do also ship to the US… I priced out a p304 configuration with the lowest Core-i5 and it comes out to ~$1010 USD (shipped via DHL) w/ no OS/hard drive… the 15.6" m504 is around $962 shipped configured similarly. Not a great price by any means, but these are the first available Maxwell laptops I’ve seen so far, in case someone is looking for one.
At GTC14 I saw the MSI GS60 up close and it was very nice. It has both an HDMI and a mini-DP so presumably 4K@60Hz is possible. It’s a 640 core Maxwell. It’s steeply priced at US$1700 though.
