The EVGA GTX 1060 SC and Linux Mint 18.1

📅 May 30, 2017
Running Linux at high resolutions with fancy desktop effects works well on low-end graphics cards, but I wanted smoother performance, silent or near-silent graphics, and plenty of ports for different monitors. What to do?

Why, look for a new card, of course!

The latest 1080 line from Nvidia is overkill for my needs, but the 1060 is perfect. I wanted smoother desktop effects compared to the older Radeon card I had been using, and when I found the EVGA 1060 SC 3GB graphics card on sale, it was a must-buy.

Featuring lower power consumption, more cores, higher clock speeds, five ports to connect a variety of monitors, and favorable performance (in case my original plans on Linux are lackluster I can still use this card elsewhere), this 1060 card is a winner for my humble needs.

There are two versions of the GTX 1060: a 3GB version and a 6GB version. After pondering various benchmarks and reviews, I saw almost no difference between the two versions (other than the huge price difference at the time), so I chose the 3GB version. After all, it was on sale comparable to the cost of a lesser 1050, which only had three ports.

The real questions are these:

• “How does the EVGA GTX 1060 SC perform in Linux Mint 18.1?”
• “Is it easy to install drivers?”
• “Does it even work at all?”

Here is my experience installing and using this card with Linux Mint 18.1 64-bit.

Hard Drive Caching in Windows 7

📅 May 6, 2017
After experiencing good success in Linux using RapidDisk and Flashcache (on older kernels) to speed up mechanical hard drive reads, I thought it would be fun to discover if such software existed for Windows.

Is it possible to install hard drive caching software in Windows 7? How would it perform?

I tried four programs, PrimoCache, HDDTurbo, SuperCache 6, and eboostr, and tested reads using CrystalDiskMark. Here are my results.