Fedora/RHEL – Find NVIDIA Video Card Model and Driver Version

NvidiaSo I while back I had the need to buy a new new video card for my Fedora 14 desktop.  Specifically I needed a semi-decent HDMI capable PCI card as my current workstation at home only has one PCI-E slot, and I wanted to use my newly acquired LSI 8888ELP in that slot. A picture of the hardware overkill is below.

 

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Sorry for the Blurry Image … I was giggling when I took the pic

Anyway, not that its pertinent to this article, but the 8888ELP was to be configured with 4 SSDs in RAID10, which to me was much cooler than having top of the line video card for a box that rarely did anything graphic intensive.

Anyway, back to the story. So I poked around online and found this big mamba-jamba PCI Nvidia card with HDMI out, which if you look at the picture below, is basically a giant heat sink with a video card attached to its undercarriage. Apparently its perfect for a HTPC as its nice and quiet without a fan. So boom, I slap that sucker in and go on with my life.

 

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Giant Heatsink with Video Card Attached

Anyway, fast forward a few months and NVIDIA has new drivers available for Linux, which supposedly offer massive performance improvements.  So I figured that I would try them out, but by this time I have forgotten what video card I am using, who made it, and if I am using the vendor's drivers.

So the first thing I do is run the command below which updates the hardware descriptions which lspci spits out

# update-pciids

Next I run lspci and figure out that I have an NVIDIA Card.

06:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 430] (rev a1)

Ok now lets see if I am using NVIDIA's drivers. I accompish this by attempting to run the command below

# nvidia-settings

Which pops up a nice little GUI, that tells me which driver version I am running.

NVIDIA Driver Version :280.13

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