G400MAX on a LX board (AGP 2X?)

[cnyb]

Hi,
I'm thinking about buying a G400Max but I'm a bit concered with some issues;
1) I heard that some LX boards has problems with AGP 2X and G200. Is this also true for the G400?
2)Is there a driver available for Win NT yet(I didn't see any at Matrox)? I only use Win98 for gaming...

TIA & BR /Chris

The machine I'll use it on;
SM P6DLF, 2xPII-333, 256Mb, 4*Cheetah 4,5G RAID 0 ASUS PCI-DA2100 32Mb, etc etc...

[SteveC]

I don't know about LX boards. I seem to recall some having troubles supplying the required power to the graphics cards.
Maybe someone from Matrox can confirm/deny this?

But I do know that there are NT drivers - and they come on the driver CD.

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

My PC houses one of these things which seems to affect some people's lives far too much...

[paulcs]

There's nothing for Matrox to deny? Voodoo3 and TNT2 owners have experienced it as well. Apparently, there was a design flaw in some early implementations of the LX chipset. As a result, an insufficient amount of power is delivered to the AGP slot.

I believe Asus, Abit, and AOpen have all admitted to the problem and are willing to fix it or replace your board. Asus went so far as to post a fix on their website. It isn't for the faint at heart, as it involves soldering.

If you can get your hands on a current generation AGP board, from what I understand, the problem is generally pretty easy to diagnose. Black screen, those nasty "no video" beeps, and the LED on your monitor remains amber. (I haven't heard of the AGP 2x problems, possibly because the symptoms I mentioned are a bit more dramatic.)

I'd try to test your board with a friend's TNT2, Voodoo3, or G400 before doing anything dramatic. If you get a video failure, it might be time for an upgrade. The good news is the BX chipset, rather late in its life, has really come into its own.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[EchoWars]

Good question..and deserves an answer..


Up

[beserker]

Hello!

I am running my 32meg vanilla G400 on an ABIT LX6 with no problems at AGP 2X. I have run Halflife, Battlezone and Mechwarrior3 in Direct3D with no problems. I have 64megs of RAM and a PII-300. OS is Win95 OSR2.1 with the latest USB patch and INF updater installed. I hope this helps.

Sincerely,
Beserker

[cnyb]

Hi again and thanks for your replies,

I went out and bought a G400 DH 32Mb, couldn't find any max - I could overclock it to 152/204 (with a fan). Will powerstrip make it more overclockable than this?

I did get AGP 1X, haven't tried to force it in to 2X mode yet. Don't think the performance difference is _that_ big?

Tried half-life at 1024*768 - really smooth (don't know fps though). Falcon4 campain at 800*600 - not so smooth (15-20 fps in 2d cockpit). TE works fine with 30-35 fps. Guess this is because my processors are a bit on the slow side.

The current machine I'm using the board in is a dual PII-333 (oc'd to 375) on a SuperMicro P6DLF, 256Mb ram, a nice 21"monitor, good sound and freakin fast disks (4*10k UWSCSI RAID0). I normally use this machine (Win NT - hence the dual) and don't want to separate theese parts (Win98 is used for gaming).
My second machince has a PII300 oc'd to 450 on a Gigabyte GA6BA (BX, can't oc any higher - probably AGP 2X), 128Mb ram, a shitty 17" monitor, bad sound and pretty fast disks (3*7200 UDMA33 RAID0). Win98 (a Marvel in this one).

Can anybody estimate the speed I'd gain by moving the card to the 450 machine?
Has anybody been sucessful with Falcon 4 in Win NT (using the directX5 hack)? I'm thinking that the duals might give some extra then...

Thanks for reading this & BR
/Chris

[This message has been edited by cnyb (edited 08-26-1999).]

[Jupp]

Hi folks,

just installed my MAX in an Asus P2L97 PII-300 system. Initially I got AGP 1x. Forced it to AGP 2x, no problems so far.

My first impression: GREAT.

cu,
R.

[KvHagedorn]

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