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I recently discovered, in a brief discussion with kos, that Nvidia does not produce its own graphic cards (apart from Quadro series), but other manufacturers are producing and selling them (Zotac, EVGA, Gigabyte, ...).

So, it's rather easy (lspci, lshw) to know the chipset of your graphic card, but Google didn't help us in find a way to know the manufacturer.

Why should someone be interested in it?
Because depending on the manufacturer we have different clocks, different cooling systems, different capabilities.

So, how can we know the manufacturer/producer from Ubuntu?
Is there an equivalent command of dmidecode for GPUs?
Other ideas that do not involve physically opening the computer and look for hints there?

4 Answers 4

14

You can run lspci -knn | grep VGA -A1 and see the manufacturer.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GF116 [GeForce GTX 550 Ti] [10de:1244] (rev a1)
    Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:351a]

or without PID & VID lspci -k | grep VGA -A1:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF116 [GeForce GTX 550 Ti] (rev a1)
    Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device 351a

You can do it in one command:

lspci -k | awk '/VGA/{getline; print $2}'

This will give the full vendor string:

lspci -k | awk '/VGA/{getline;sub("^[^ ]* ","");sub("Device.*","");print}'
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  • 1
    Nice, I thought lspci would have show only the chip. Quick hack to print the manufacturer directly: lspci -knn | perl -ne 'if(/^[^ ]* VGA/){$_=<>;s/^[^:]*: (.*)Device.*/$1/;print;exit}'
    – kos
    Oct 13, 2015 at 10:12
  • @Pilot6 saved my day :D
    – Deki
    Jan 1, 2020 at 12:46
0

There are various ways to find out the manufacturer of your graphic card. One of the ways is using lspci command:

lspci | grep -i vga

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

In the case above, as you can see the manufacturer is Intel.

You can also get all the hardware information for your graphic card as follows:

lshw -class display
2
0

Another command:

lspci  -v

Sample output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 5000P Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev b1)
    Subsystem: Super Micro Computer Inc Device 9280
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
    Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
    Capabilities: [58] MSI: Enable- Count=1/2 Maskable- 64bit-
    Capabilities: [6c] Express Root Port (Slot-), MSI 00
    Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5000 Series Chipset PCI Express x8 Port 2-3 (rev b1) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
    Bus: primary=00, secondary=01, subordinate=05, sec-latency=0
    I/O behind bridge: 00002000-00002fff
    Memory behind bridge: d8200000-d83fffff
    Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
    Capabilities: [58] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/2 Maskable- 64bit-
    Capabilities: [6c] Express Root Port (Slot-), MSI 00
    Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
    Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
    Kernel modules: shpchp
....
.....
...
0a:01.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc ES1000 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Super Micro Computer Inc Device 9280
    Flags: bus master, stepping, fast Back2Back, medium devsel, latency 66, IRQ 11
    Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=128M]
    I/O ports at 3000 [size=256]
    Memory at d8400000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
    [virtual] Expansion ROM at d8420000 [disabled] [size=128K]
    Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

OR - Install a GUI:

sudo apt-get install gnome-device-manager

To run it - gnome-device-manager

0

Also, if the card is not installed, you can check the FCC number stamped on the card itself. Once you have that, a bit of Googling can reveal the manufacturer.

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  • The question was how to find the vendor without pulling out the card. The vendor is almost always printed too.
    – Pilot6
    Oct 13, 2015 at 19:22
  • @Pilot6 missed the part about not opening the box. But in my days of building white box PCs and working in PC repair, I saw quite a few unmarked peripherals. Oct 14, 2015 at 19:29

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