[clug] Diagnosing display freeezes

[Hal Ashburner]

I'm running centos 7 on a core i7(1) with an nvidia graphics card(2)
and using the nouveau drivers. Gnome 3 desktop with dual (2560 x 1440)
screens.

The display randomly freezes.The characteristics of the freeze is that
when typing, keystrokes eventually appear but this is delayed for
seconds at a time. The freezess are more than occasional, at least
every 5 minutes, but sometimes 3 or 4 in a minute. Typing this email
in firefox is quite jerky with multiple sub second delays. When the
display is frozen the mouse pointer position continues to update. (3)

Previously I was running centos 6 with nvidia proprietary drivers and
had display updating issues of a slightly different nature. This makes
me suspect the nvidia hardware. This would be the third nvidia
graphics card in one of my machines that is faulty in the last 2
years. Maybe I'm just unlucky.

How do I find out more about this to diagnose that the card needs
replacing properly or alternatively that there's a driver problem, or
an X problem or something else? Any pointers better than "buy a new
card and see what happens"?




(1)
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 45
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz

(2)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK104 [GeForce
GTX 760] (rev a1)


(3) Reminiscent of using an proprietary operating system in the 90s.