On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Willie Matthews
<matthews.wil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/02/12 13:09, Willie Matthews wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I have been dealing with this problem for awhile now. I have two nVidia
>> video cards, one is a PNY 8400 GS PCIe and the other is a 6150 LE built
>> onto the board.
>>
>> Problem is I want to use the nVidia driver with my 8400 GS but when I do
>> try to use it, it will just lock up the entire computer. Sometime I can
>> ssh in and sometimes I can't. I don't have compiz or anything like that.
>> I am using the xfce compositor.
>>
>> While I do get to use the card for about 30 seconds to a minute, I can't
>> open the nVidia X Server Settings panel, display panel nor anything that
>> has to do with flash in chrome.
>>
>> A couple of the things that I have noticed about the Xorg Log is that
>> the 8400 GS is reported as having 512mb or video memory when I know it
>> is only 256. The 6150 is reported as having 256 and I am not sure how
>> much that one is using. I have a feeling it is shared.
>>
>> When I am using the 6150 LE and I have the 8400 GS in also. The nVidia X
>> Server Setting also says the same amounts of video memory.
>>
>> I haven been using this install of Gentoo for years now. The only thing
>> that has changed in that time that has to do with Video Cards is Cuda. I
>> use to use it a little for experiments. All in all the 6150 doesn't
>> support Cuda and the 8400 GS does.
>>
>> Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
>>
> I just learned about the command nvidia-smi.
> 8400 GS 256mb of ram
> 6150 LE has 64mb.
>
> Either way X thinks that the 6150 has more than it really does and the
> same goes for the 8400. Must not be the reason X is crashing on one and
> not the other.
My first suspicion is that the card may have gone bad. I have had more
video cards fail than any other component over the last few years. It
seems they always overheat and die on me, or get zapped by power
spikes. If you have the ability to remove the card and try only the
on-board, or try another card, it might help narrow it down.
Second suspicion is driver. Try changing to an older version of the
driver and see if that helps.
Third, this might be a long shot, but I had a problem with
nvidia-drivers freezing very shortly after I started X and ended up
being due to my card not liking the power-saving the drivers enable by
default. If I ran nvidia-settings and manually changed it to
full-power/performance mode (I don't remember the exact wording) it
would be fine, but the nvidia-settings commandline did not have an
option for this so I couldn't script it to run upon login. In your
case you can't even run nvidia-settings so that's nohelp. This
particular card I had worked fine for over a year before it suddenly
started having this problem. I believe it was caused by a change in
the drivers.
An automatic workaround I finally found was to add this RegistryDWords
line to my xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
Identifier "nVidia GT 240"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "RegistryDWords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1;
PerfLevelSrc=0x3322; PowerMizerDefault=0x1; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1"
EndSection
Good luck!
