Troubleshooting New Graphics Cards on xUbuntu

[Yellow Pasque]

Doubtful this was a fake. The fakes I'd seen where all nvidia and usually changed a low-end GT 7xx to a higher-end GT 7xx or the next level higher (whatever that was).

Yeah, that's makes sense. I don't think "fake" was the term you were looking for here. More like seller confusion.

As for trusting what Wikipedia says, that's a judgement call. Everywhere I worked, we were clearly told never to trust 2nd or 3rd party sources for information.

And you cited techpowerup, which is...??

[TheFu]

And you cited techpowerup, which is...??

Point taken. You are correct. techpowerup and all those sorts of websites seem a little untrustworthy and prone to mistakes in their spec information. It is easy to blame a website for inaccurate data, though I also suspect that the HW they are given may be engineering variants and the design wasn't fixed when they were creating a review. Then add in all the possible different configurations and it is a mess that needs a 4 page table to show all the possible options.

I know exactly where to find nVidia GPU specs and Intel iGPU specs on their websites even for very old hardware.

I feel bad for the OP. I've avoided buying any GPUs since around 2018 by getting Ryzen APUs (5600G) and Raspberry Pi v4/v5 SBCs. Those won't work for everyone for a number of reasons. I have no plans currently to replace any of them - at least not in the next 5 yrs.

[him610]

... Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD Caicos [Radeon HD 6450/7450/8450 / R5 230 OEM]
    vendor: Hightech Information System driver: radeon v: kernel
    bus-ID: 01:00.0
  Device-2: AMD Caicos [Radeon HD 6450/7450/8450 / R5 230 OEM]
    vendor: Hightech Information System driver: radeon v: kernel
    bus-ID: 02:00.0...

Looks as if there are two identical GFX cards installed.
Could there be some sort of contention between the two?

[Skaperen]

"misinformation": they accidentally tell you the wrong speed for the chip when certain software is loaded and certain action is performed.

"disinformation": they intentionally tell you the wrong speed for the chip in the hope that you will buy many old graphics cards they still have laying around collecting dust.

if you want the latest and great speed be sure to buy cards with the latest and greatest chip, or close to that if you don't need to do all the magic that new chip can do.