Hi everyone,
I’m getting a completely frozen system when using the NVIDIA driver with my laptop.
I’m running a Dell Precision M6500 with NVIDIA Quadro FX 2800M graphics. It has an i7-820QM processor, which does not have integrated graphics (so bumblebee is not related to my problem).
On installation I used the nouveau driver because I would prefer it to the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, but since the computer kept crashing when I connect my external monitor, I decided to try the NVIDIA driver anyway.
After installing it from the repositories according to https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers the external monitor works perfectly. In glxspheres I’m now getting straight 60 fps, compared to the 9-10 fps with nouveau. So, it seems I need to use the nvidia driver to get the performance I want.
However I started getting this problem: The whole system will randomly freeze when working in KDE. The screen goes black and the only thing that I can do is to force poweroff with the power button. It does not recognize any keyboard input (pressing caps lock key does not light the corresponding LED for example). The freeze reproducibly happens when I try to access the Display & Monitor section of the KDE system settings, or when I open the Run… bar with Alt+F2. However, it also happens randomly after some time - I’ve never been able to use my computer for more than 30 minutes without this crash.
So, to solve this I tried installing the nvidia driver “the hard way” (https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way) after uninstalling everything from the previous nvidia driver installation from the repository. I installed the 340.101 legacy driver, since it is the newest driver that supports my GPU. Now, however, the system already freezes at the login screen or when I first move the mouse after logging in.
I had a Dell Precision M6400 before the M6500, where I had exactly the same problem. At first, I believed the graphics card was defect (since switching from nouveau to nvidia did not solve the problem either), so I replaced the original nvidia card in that laptop with an AMD ATI FirePro card. However, with the amdgpu driver on the M6400 I was also getting this problem when running graphically intensive software or games. Normal text editors and web browsers ran fine on the M6400, but with my new M6500 I’m getting this problem whenever I boot into the graphical interface.
Does anybody know what I can do to get my nvidia graphics working with the nvidia driver and an external monitor connected to my laptop?
Please tell if I missed something or should provide more details about something 
Thanks in advance,
Martin