[mythtv-users] GT220, nVidia Driver Versions, and Heat

[Ray Parrish]

My main FE/BE has a fanless GT-220 as its video card. Starting around
driver version 260, I started noticing that it was reporting higher
and higher temperatures while playing SD material. I use the
VDPAU-High Quality playback profile under 0.24-fixes from Mythbuntu.
Playback of HD material produces lower temperatures, possibly because
there is less scaling involved.

Temperatures would sometimes top 100C, and occasionally the system
would hard-lock and require a reboot. Since I removed the x-swat repo
and rolled back to the default drivers in Lucid (195, I think?), the
temps have stayed low.

I noticed that the Avenard repo has nVidia drivers up to 260, and I
would like to nicely install that driver version for testing without
manually installing via nVidia's driver script, but without all of the
other packages. If memory serves, the nVidia-smi utility could also
report GPU utilization from that driver version.

Suggestions from the community?

-Ray