Graphics card question

#1

Hi,

If I have a radeon hd 4350 and it works out of the box on the normal installation of ubuntu, is there are risk to installing the radeon catalyst drivers?

I'm looking to buy a better graphics card, not because this card I have doesn't meet my needs, it does, it has some strange high pitched whistling going on and the sound changes when I drag a website up and down so its clearly coming from graphics related devices. The card runs with a heatsink and not a fan so its puzzling. I had a nvidea card however I had issues when it was running so used radeon instead.

Coming back to the above query, If I buy a better card one which sadly has a fan I will need to install catalyst so thought I might get some practice in. Thanks in advance.

#2

Hi,
You don't need to install drivers for your card, they're already in the kernel.

Coil whine is a thing with some GPUs and nothing to be afraid of. You won't kill your GPU by browsing the web.

#3

What about the new card? I don't want noise because I want a silent pc. Would the kernel control the fan speed? I generally use my computer for web surfing and watching youtube videos, no gaming so the card should not get a high load.

AMD ATI Radeon HD7670 2GB DDR5 PCI-Express Graphic card

Screenshot from 2021-04-03 16-05-42

#4

Same for the new card.
Fan speed should automatically be taken care of.
Should you want to fine tune the card, there's a utility called CoreCtrl.

#5

OK thanks, I read someone write up a description to install it but it looked a little complicated so I wanted to see if I could avoid the hassle.

#6

Something I find interesting while searching ebay, is that Radeon appears to be a small proportion of results.

Anyway, I also get a high pitched hiss from the computer upon entry of certain usb slots with usb memory chips. I have never seen this phenomena in previous computers, is there any kind of manipulation available of the power/current of these usb or pci devices which might possibly affect their pitch?

#7

There are several reasons for that.

  • There's a massive shortage of GPUs on the market at the moment - due to Covid (production issues + massive demand) and cryptomining - that should last for a while. Any interesting second hand GPU at an interesting price should not be visible for long.
  • There are way less Radeon GPUs on the market as fewer people use them. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
    75.41% Nvidia vs 16.18% AMD in march 2021.
  • AMD has not been competitive in the high end GPU market (performances/power consumption) until recently with the RDNA2 cards hence the lack of popularity. People targeted with those products -(gamers) usually tend to side with the best brand of the moment and spit on the other like their product would struggle to run Minesweeper. They just love brands wars. See what happens with CPUs from AMD's Bulldozer architecture till Zen+/Zen2. Now they hate Intel (they still make great processors though their newest lineup has power consumption issues) with passion because it runs a game they don't play at 2fps less in 720p than the AMD counterparts.
  • Older AMD GPUs were popular with miners.

They're great GPUs (especially for Linux with the open source drivers) but gamers tend to stay with Nvidia at the moment due to (meme?) features like Raytracing (worse on AMD cards) or DLSS ( AMD's working on a similar feature) and bad reputation is hard to get rid of.

As for your coil whine issues, I don't know of any way to change the pitch.

#8

As it happens I found the source of the hiss, it was usb related. My keyboard is usb and goes into a little usb to pin adapter for the old style keyboard pins. When I plugged it straight to use the hiss stopped. However the computer then had bizarre booting issues and wouldnt boot up. After I put the original setup with the pin adapater I then got normal use of the computer after a few reboots. I'm going to wiggle the cables a bit for the ssd and see if that is the source of the problem. the biios could see the ssd and the hdd however it just wouldnt boot the boot loader.

#9

What you are describing sounds like a power supply problem to me. As the power load changes, some component in the power supply is making noise and changing pitch.

Depending on the age of your motherboard, a used Firepro W4100 might be a better option than the double slot HD7670. On my systems I use the Firepro W4100 to drive a 55 inch 4K TV -- the Firepro W4100 will do 4K, I think the HD7670 is limited to 2560×1600. Linux doesn't need anything special to manage the Firepro.

djb

#10

OK well the hissing has got a lot better since I worked out I can shuffle the usb devices around and I am still using the keyboard directly to usb rather tha the pin adapter. I now have a much stranger issue in Windows, whilst I realise this is not a windows forum, wonder if the knowledge of linux software can help my windows problem.

OK so I installed a new graphics card which my nephew had, its a Asus Radeon HD7750 1GD5 V2. It works perfectly fine in ubuntu 20.04 and the linux install runs both my pc monitor and the tv as duplicate screens fine.

the card showing output to the monitor via DVI cable and the TV via a HDMI cable, during boot up of windows 10 the TV turns blank stating no video available and I cannot see where I am going wrong here. The monitor is apparently seen by the software from asus which I downloaded the correct drivers for this card Asus Radeon HD7750 1GD5 V2 as you can see in the print screen as display 1 32w LCD TV and it obviously too sees its connection via the HDMI so why isn't it using it?

The computer boots and shows the initial bios loader on both screens but it just turns off the monitor during startup of windows 10. Now heres the weird thing, in windows I can extend the display to both screens fine, however if I go to duplicate it wont work at all. Do you think whomever made the software for linux drivers for this card made some for windows users too? Now I tried using an old monitor which is vga instead of the dvi by using a dvi canle to vga adapter and this meant I could see duplicate desktops however this then created a whole new problem. The windows software will only let you duplicate the screen by using the same resolution on both, where as in linux I can have different resolutions. This meant new problem of I either get full screen on the smaller monitor and a shrunken desktop on the larger tv or I get at another resolution a full tv screen but with a reduced screen on the smaller monitor.

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