I just switched my desktop (the one with the GTX970 G1 Gaming) from windows to linux and got a very nice surprise: on windows, when mining, the mouse is lagging and the machine is pretty much unusable. On linux, no such thing! The machine is happily mining Quark at 17MH while I watch a 1080p video on Youtube.
What is this witchery? Not that I'm complaining...
BTW, it's about time for my donation, so here's a beer SP: 3bb1e5e50d3967cfc8f5e14aa700c316fc69c45380fcad938aed2d67fc62615c
which distro did you use? ... redhat based or debian based? ...
My miner is on CentOS6, because nvidia's debian repository was acting up at the time.
My desktop is on Ubuntu. I don't like it that much, but once you clean it up, it's okay. And the list of supported OSes from nvidia is so short it doesn't leave much of a choice.