How to still use nvidia340 or nvidia390 – Part 1

Yes, Nvidia screwed the known universe by dropping support for both nvidia340 and nvidia390 drivers without Open-Sourcing them. They have Open-Sourced some of their newer driver code but not enough that any individual or organization could take it and run.

What we have here is pure greed.

Uneducated Script Kiddies have bought into the marketing BS that if it isn’t the latest and greatest, it’s nothing. They will deride and otherwise empty their colons on anyone wanting to use an 8+ year old video card for anything. They are not intelligent enough to consider any use case other than playing the latest video game. Be proud mom and dad. That’s your genetic F-up. One day soon it will be choosing the nursing home to abandon you in all because you thought the world should raise your child, believing your only responsibility was having the child. Thanks for polluting the gene pool!

Use Case #1

With Imbecile-in-Chief having temper tantrums, hurling tariffs at everyone, and getting us into yet another endless war without Congressional approval, the economy is in the toilet and the Ti-D-Bol Man is revving the boat engine in the tank.

Your ill-begotten offspring don’t understand that gasoline is has more than doubled (remember when it was $2/gallon? Knew you could!) and that a head of lettuce, which used to be about 37 cents was recently more than $2.50 at Kroger. When you don’t have illegal aliens to pick that stuff, producers have to let it rot in the field. Your offspring certainly can’t be bothered to work an actual job picking fruits and vegetables or in the trades building houses.

That gives us the K-Shaped Economy. I don’t like that diagram because it makes things look fair or even.

That was from a 2025 article.

Families in the bottom 50% up to about half way into the next 40% have to make tough choices when it comes to a home computer. They aren’t dropping $85K and change on a “refurbished” video card.

When these families purchase a “family computer” they are looking to spend $300 or less for the entire system. That is desktop, keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

Mostly this computer is used for budgeting, coupon clipping, and homework. When you get to the top end of the bottom 70%, they may have a couple of old games. Retrocomputing isn’t just a thing wealthy people piss money away on. For some families, it’s the only computer they have. Many homes don’t have a computer or Internet at all.

Use Case #2 – BOINC

Some of us actually care about the human species. No, not you.

Most of us have flip phones. Many of the older crowd just have a land line at home. Why? Because they have a life. You don’t.

We don’t throw out old computers. We install a Linux distro on them and run BOINC. There are any number of projects you can choose to support. Most of us have about six favorites. As you can see, the projects can satisfy a wide range of interests.

Some (possibly all) of us have shelves, racks, or basements full of machines crunching numbers. I personally never have less than four. A friend of mine has twelve. I have communicated with others that have 30+ machines running BOINC. We don’t care what you think. We aren’t wasting electricity on crypto or social media data centers. There’s a shiny new Ebola outbreak. Some of us have machines looking for a cure. I’m also looking for cures for cancer while helping climate models get better at predicting weather. Hey, I live on a farm, weather is important!

How do we get so many machines?

Whenever we have $500-$800 to piss down the drain, we poke around online to find a desktop of reasonable speed with at least 16GB, preferably 32GB of RAM. No OS. Many times we don’t even care about it having a hard drive because we have stacks of old ones. We also poke around online for good used Nvidia video cards. Not the $300 “entry level” cards they are selling now. We look for cards that need the 340 or 390 drivers having a few hundred CUDA core. Quardo K2000 and GeForce GT630 cards are choice. They have 384 CUDA core, a bit of RAM and can be had for under $20.

Hell, I’ve got a 6-core AMD Athalon machine with an old Nvidia card that I’ve basically had since new. I’ve replaced a few things on it over the years, but it’s still looking to cure cancer among other things. Anymore I don’t look at “spare” machines that are below 6th gen i7. Trying to focus more on AMD machines since Intel appears to be going out of business. Always wanting a case with external drive bays and a DVD RW drive. Sometimes you have to hillbilly one together.

Continued in part 2