What kind of system runs the techdemo???

[jasonk]

I have a Matrox G400 32MB DH which has been giving me lots of trouble in the past couple of weeks. The 3D display quality is poor, and DVD movies are jerky and unwatchable. It's intended home was in my Athlon 600 system w/128MB RAM, an ASUS K7M board, a SB LIVE! Value, a 3COM NIC, and a 300W Sparkle PS. All the components had their own IRQ. After removing the G400 in favor of a Diamond Stealth III G540, (yes, I'm serious, the Savage4 looks much better than the Matrox here), I placed the G400 in a Celeron 466 machine w/64MB RAM. I installed the drivers and the techdemo, and ran it to see if it looked as crappy as it did in the Athlon system. To my surprise, I get a message on the screen before running the demo that my computer doesn't have enough memory to use full textures, and that the quality would not be as good. Well, they were telling the truth about that: The demo looked even worse on the Celeron system. The whole thing was jerky and hard to watch. On the Athlon system, everything was pretty smooth, with the razorback effect the only real problem.

This whole thing makes me wonder though: What are the system requirements for a Matrox G400 to work properly? I thought 64MB of memory would be enough for the techdemo at least, and a 466 Celeron should at least be able to keep up with the video card, but that isn't the case here. I'm starting to think that the video card might be bad. If you have any ideas as to what else the problem might be, I'd appreciate a response

[Goc]

hi jasonk...

before you go thrashing G400 (savage4 is better in quality?!?) I have to tell you that Matrox G400 16 Mb SH worked like a charm in my Celeron 400 system with 64 Mb RAM... techdemo ran smooth as silk, and all oter games likewise with, what is most important, best picture quality I've ever seen (and I've seen alot, believe me)... Also DVD titles played without a twitch on a Celeron 333 system with 64 megs'o'ram... Seems to me like you are doing something wrong with your machines setups, or it is possible, you have a faulty G400.
Just stick with us here, tell us more about your machine (SB live drivers? IRQ list...), and I'm sure we'll get that card working in no time

Jorden, Paul... step in and help me out here. Matrox honour is at stake!

[adamhamilton]

I understand that the 3COM diagnositc utility can cause a lot of problems (not just with the G400).

It is supposed to disrupt DVD decoding too!

If you have this installed, uninstall it.
I actually had to re-install Win98 to solve my problems.

[scotty]

hiya

you might want to check that you are getting agp transfers on the celery machine. use the pci list program from the murc site, under the utilities link.

8¬)

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p2 266@300 (4x75mhz) | qdi legend-v, lx chipset, bios 2.0sl | 96 mb pc100 | mill g200agp@99mhz 8mb sg, bios 2.6, pd 5.3 | win 98se

[jasonk]

Thanks for your replies, everyone. It's nice to find a forum like this which is actually helpful! Truth is, I love Matrox, and if I hadn't gotten such a good deal on my Voodoo3, (even up for my 8MB G200!) I'd still be a happy customer of theirs. And no, the Voodoo3's quality is not even as good as the G200, but its much, much faster in Half-Life and Q3A. I'm leaning towards a G400 MAX as my next video card, but the problems I had with the G400 in that Celeron system make me a little nervous. (Like so many others, I have a 300A @ 450 )

I hate the Savage4. That's why I'm so disappointed in my G400 right now. While I'm as capable of making mistakes as anyone else, I'm also a computer tech by trade, and have gone through IRQ settings and about every post on this forum. I think that the card just may be faulty, but I might also just be missing something. It's on IRQ 11, and the SB LIVE drivers are off the CD, so I think it's Liveware 2.0. I've tried the latest Matrox drivers right on down to the ones on the CD. I do not have the 3COM diagnostic loading, either. Win98's drivers worked fine for my NIC. I wanted to run Sandra99 to check AGP mode, but the thing crashes when I try to run the mobo or system info modules. My only guess on that is that it doesn't work on the Athlon platform yet, since Winstone 99 runs flawlessly every time. The one thing here I have not tried yet is PCI list. I'll have to do that first thing tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestions!

[Goc]

Make sure to let us know what happened jason!