G400 to G400 MAX?

[cputnam]

O.K. All questions as to my sanity are welcome.

I purchased a G400SH last June at a trade show. Despite some driver related issues on occasion, very happy with it.

I've upgraded to Win2000 Pro and use my system primarily for wordprocessing, graphics. I'm considering upgrading to the G400MAX for the added speed and...for games too.

Whadayathink...worth the investment?

[xippo@work]

Depends on how bad you want to upgrade.

You probably wont see any benefits for graphic apps unless you use high resolutions with 32 bit color. Games will play slightly better if you have a fast processor, otherwise you are limited by your CPU. Anything under a PII 400 and you probably won't get any better performance. Dual head is great if you use it though.

If you want to upgrade, wait for the G450. Probably out within a couple of months.

xippo

[Rik]

Do you fancy overclocking your vanilla G400? A large number of them can make it to G400 MAX speed (and beyond). If you are successful then you'll have a MAX minus the dualhead (and the extra 16mb of ram if yours in only a 16mb card).
If you're really desperate to part with cash, than hang on if you can for the G450. Or send it to me. I'd be soooo grateful.

(Sorry for echoing your suggestions, Xippo, but you 'slipped in' while I was typing!)

[This message has been edited by Rik (edited 28 March 2000).]

[YoKoMo [1]]

While I would like to agree with the other posters, I don't beleive overclocking a G400 will make up for the speed difference inherant in the G400MAX, and to prove it. My roommate and myself both have the exact same systems, PIII 650E oc/d to 805Mhz, Asus P3B-F, 384MB Ram, 2 Seagate Cheetazzzz, Adaptec 2940U2W Controlers, and 3COM NICS. My benchmark scores in 3DMARK 99 and 2000 and much higher then his, we tried overclocking his card to as close to a MAX as possible (I think we got it to around 145/190+, cannot remember for sure, but my card clocked at the default which it has always been at is still faster in everything I do. Both systems have minial installs of WIn98SE and Office 2000 and various little programs but we use the exact same stuff and refresh installs frequently, yet my card always comes out faster, sometimes just a little, sometimes alot faster. He's thinking of ditching his G400 for a MAX as well, but I told him to wait for the new one when it's released.

------------------
PIII 650E at 805Mhz, G400Max, Asus P3B-F (ain't none better!), 384MB PC133 Memory, 2 Seagate 18GB Cheeeeetazzzz.

[Nuno]

YoKoMo: Sorry, but it doesn´t work that way. Both chips are the same, when clocked at the same core/memory speed, they will perform the same. An overclocked chip to 150 Mhz will not perform inferiorly to the "official" 150 Mhz chip. If it runs stable, performance wise, they are the same.
And keep in mind "exact same systems" are not always exact same systems. For a start 140/190 are not max speeds, so of course It´ll perform slower. Memory settings in the bios do a huge diference too. By tweaking memory, I got a 300+ 3dmark99 increase, despiting being the "same" system.

[YoKoMo [1]]

Please post your memory optimizations so I can try those with my roommate's machine. Maybe he can save a few bucks.

[This message has been edited by YoKoMo [1] (edited 29 March 2000).]

[xippo]

cputnam: If you can wait for a week, I will post UT and Q3A timedemo stats for when I move from my G400 to G400 MAX. The system will stay the same, i'm just doing a card swap. I'm interested to know myself how much better the MAX is. My system should be powerful enough to notice a difference. I'm on a P3 500. I will do lots of stats with both cards so we should get a fair representation of how much better the MAX is.

xippo

[APV]

Y don't you just overclock it, I am able to overclock my G400 SH to 295 stable very near G400 Max which is at 300

[smokva]

I don't understand.
G400 is running at 126/160MHZ (memory/core), and MAX 150/200.
So what would that 295 bee ?

There is no way to change RAMDAC which is 300 at G400, and 360Mhz at MAX

[smokva]

BTW my G4+MDH4A16G works at 155/210, even faster than MAX's default