NVIDIA Geforce GT 710 on Linux Mint

Recently my graphics card broke down, a good old NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS. I wanted to find a new card quickly, so I jumped on my bicycle and went to the local computer store, VNG Systems in Gouda. There I bought the NVIDIA GeForce GT 710, an entry-level graphics card but good enough to me. For less than 50 euros and within an hour I was able to continue working on mt PC.

Installing the NVIDIA Geforce GT 710 on Linux Mint 17.3

The Geforce GT 710 works fine on Mint without installing drivers. If you still want the native NVIDIA drivers, you can install those quickly with a few simple commands.

First, you need to add the driver-PPA (personal package archive) to your system using the command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
After that you should update the package lists as usual:
sudo apt-get update
To find the latest version available for download, type ths next command and then press the TAB key instead of ENTER:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-
When I was doing this install the latest version was “nvidia-367”, so I entered the following command:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-367
Downloading and installing the drivers can take a few minutes, so do not abort the process. After installation is complete, you can restart the computer to load the new drivers.

It doesn’t matter if for some reason you didn’t install the latest drivers. The Mint Update Manager will check for the most recent drivers after reboot and will offer you to install those if you want.

Checking the installation

After the reboot you can check the driver manager to see if the drivers were installed correctly:

Or by using this command:
glxinfo | grep OpenGL

NVIDIA Geforce GT 710 versus 8600 GTS

According to the different benchmarks, there should be only little difference in performance between the two cards. I use this computer mainly for programming purposes (Eclipse, Android Studio, Arduino) whick will not show a lot of difference between the old and the new Geforce. I do not play games often, just occasionally Command and Conquer on Windows, and that game runs as smooth on the GT 710 as it does on the 8600 GTS. I also quickly tested the video playback with a couple of 1080p YouTube videos and those too play as smooth as before. Besides performance, the GT 710 has a few advantages over the 8600 GTS:

• The GT 710 doesn’t use as much power;
• Therefore it doesn’t need the power connection to the PSU anymore;
• And also only requires passive cooling, so there is noticable less noise;
• In addition to DVI it also has a HDMI connection, so no more DVI-to-HDMI adaptor required;
• On the GT 710 you can use the 3 displays simultaneously and independently (HDMI, DVI and VGA), on the 8600 GTS just two displays (2x DVI).

All in all to me is the NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 a good replacement for a broken Geforce 8600 GTS, and it works flawlessly under Linux.