# nvidia 8400GS 64-bit driver install



## Anonymous (Dec 9, 2012)

I incautiously bought an EVGA 8400GS card because it only draws ~30W.  But it's not recognised by Xorg.  

Nvidia have a driver for many of their cards including this one (NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86_64-304.51.tar.gz) but they seem not to have tested their (needlessly-complicated) makefile, since it breaks when run.

Before I do the work of debugging it, has someone else perhaps already done that?


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## Uniballer (Dec 9, 2012)

I'm running nvidia-driver-304.64 on a 9.1 amd64 system with an 8400GS card.  I built everything from ports.


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## Anonymous (Dec 9, 2012)

So is it recognised by whatever version of Xorg that 9.1 loads?  It certainly wasn't recognised by 8.3's

(edit) Wait...304.64?  Two days ago I got 304.41 (iirc) and just noticed today that it's .51.  What's going on?


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## Uniballer (Dec 9, 2012)

I built the default x11/xorg-7.5.2 from the ports tree on the 9.1 amd64 systems.  I made sure that the linux emulator was loaded before trying to build the x11/nvidia-driver port.  I added the line 
	
	



```
nvidia_load="YES"
```
 to /boot/loader.conf, and configured Xorg to use the driver using the x11/nvidia-xconfig port.

I can't remember much about 8.3 on amd64.  The only system I still have running 8-stable is on i386 and using nvidia-driver-304.43.  Same deal for building and configuring as on 9.1, though.

The ports tree I updated with portsnap today still has x11/nvidia-driver at 304.64.


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## Anonymous (Dec 9, 2012)

Gee, that's weird.  Thanks for the information -- I'll have to re-do the install to see whether I can figure out what went wrong.

Nvidia's current rev of the driver (I just fetched a copy) is 310.19, revved last month.  They have their driver support set up in such a strange way that googling for the driver gets an almost random page.


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## SirDice (Dec 10, 2012)

Stick to using the port. If you want to use a newer driver simply change the version numbers in the Makefile and run *make makesum*.


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