Can G400 handle 133MHz bus speed? (tomshardware)

[Micko]

I saw this (check below) article on Tomshardware and..check yourself!
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic...321/index.html

Micko,

[Gurm]

Tom is, as usual, full of shit. Maybe if his RAM were up to par he wouldn't have this problem. Note that the Voodoo boards, which don't use system RAM at all, passed just fine. *sigh*

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Nuno]

Actually it was not Tom, it was some guy named Silvino Moronzco or something like that. It´s a perfect example of hardware reviewers who actually seem to be living in a cave. I mean, every hardware freak in the net and their dogs know that the G400 is one of the most tolerant AGP cards concerning AGP bus speeds. Ok, not every G400 is the same, so he got a bad one (assuming that he didn´t run the card at 133 1/1, that wouldn´t surprise me...). But a guy being paid to review hardware should know it.

[Scytale]

Actually, I think Silvino is a frequent visitor of the murc forums

[Darin]

I seem to recall seeing some posts here (or maybe elsewhere) of people with G400's not being able to do an 89mhz bus. The overwhelming majority of posts I have seen don't have a problem though, and some go higher. I think this is a problem with the majority of the hardware reviews we see: only one sample is used. We all know that all pieces are not created equal (look at the wide range of overclockability of cpus of the same stepping). Making a decision based on one review is not wise.

On a related note: I just got a G400, and my system IS currently running 89mhz FSB (the best I can overclock my C366). Although my v4400 TNT1 had no problems with it at a 1:1 agp multiplier (89mhz) had no problems with it, the G400 won't pass the AGP2x test. In fact, it won't even pass it at 2/3 (59mhz). I can, however, force AGP2x, and don't seem to be any worse for it (and benchmarks do improve). I've read posts here about similar problems, and suggestions that it might be tied to a fit problem with the agp slot on Abit boards, but I've played with it & no change. I do seem to have some strange behavior and occasional lockups in QIII that weren't there before, but it can happen at 1x too. Any ideas?

[Ali]

Matrox cards have ALWAYS been good for overclocking. I have my G400 at 100Mhz (1/1 at AGP2X), my G200 is in my girlfriends machine at 133Mhz (2/3), and my Millenium2 AGP did 124Mhz at 1/1! I dont think any other card would do that.

OK, Ive been lucky, and a good power supply and mobo help, but Ive never had a Matrox card that wouldnt overclock to at least as much as I needed, and Ive had lots of them.

It just makes you mad when people talk about something they havent researched, and expect to be taken at gospel.

Oh well, at least we know better.

Ali

[Scout255]

mine has run @ 93 1/1 so this guy is so full of shit

[Nuno]

So if Silvino is a frequent here, he should know that generally G400 do quite well with 89 mhz bus speeds. So he omited that in the review, giving a bad image of the G400. So yes, he´s full of shit. But that´s understandable, being "full of shit" is a must to post something in tomshardware.

[Thundrchez]

Anybody who reads tom's hardware knows that he is biased in favor of AMD and nVidia. I don't know how much this affects the statistics of his reviews, though.

With overclocking an AGP card to 2/3 of a 133MHz FSB, you are going a good bit out of spec and it should not be expected that every card can handle it. They say pretty much just that. However, they give it the impression that *every* card of the same model they had would have the same 133MHz oc'ing success as they had. That is completely inaccurate. Every G400 that Matrox ships will be able to go a little bit above spec. Some will be able to go much higher than others. Matrox has two bins for their parts, G400 and G400MAX, and then they did a minor tweak to officially bless the entire board with agp4x support. The same goes for the quality of the ram on the boards and the PCBs themselves. For their G400 not to make it to 133 doesn't mean that mine will not.

My G400 can do 124MHz FSB (whatever 2/3 of that is) very nicely. However, something else in my system can't handle 129. I tried booting at 129, and Norton AntiVirus detected a virus in emm386.exe...or at least it thought it did.

[Corwin_Brute]

Yes, Tom's benchmarks are often flawed. Remember Q3 test timedemo ?
I don't trust him at all...

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Corwin the Brute

[Bad Sector]

G400 Max here running at 96 AGP (144.4 FSB) no problemo for over six weeks.

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P3 600E OCed to 866 MHz (6x144.4 FSB) w/Alpha P3125s, Soyo 6BA+IV, WD Expert 20.5GB 7200/ATA66 HDD, 128MB Micron-8E/e PC100, G400 Max, 20" Dell/Sony D2026T, 19" Gateway/Sony VX900T, IWill 2935UW scsi card, Afreey 56x EIDE CDRom, Matsushta 7503-B 8x/20x CD-R,Pioneer DVD303s SCSI dvdrom, SB Live! X-Gamer,Creative

WebCam GO, Diamond SupraExpress 56e SP, Inwin Q500 Full Tower w/ 300W Power Supply, 14 case fans, blowers etc.

[Finberg]

I was so mad after I read that article I didn't check to see if it had been posted on or not. After I posted, I saw this and deleted it.

I have never had a problem with my G400 Max and have even had it up to 103 (100fsb with turbo enabled, agp 1/1). It runs fine on my p3-450 at 600 although when I run it at 640 (142fsb) I get some pixel corruption in dvd and movie playback. Also some weird blues on windows in CS but that may be due to the fact that my pc133 isn't the best and I also have a stick of pc100 in there. Either way, it should pass blindfolded, hands tied behind its back at 133fsb

[Silvino]

First off I would like to say greetings to everyone who frequents this board as I haven't posted here since I worked for AMD a while back. I'm here to clarify some things that I have said and answer some arguements that people have made against some of my comments. The topic of overclocking anything is usually never very clear cut if you take the attempts of the many and weigh them vs the number of successful cases. Now that we have brought up overclocking in the AGP area on our website, I seem to have hit a major nerve with a few of you. This is fine as you are all very passionate at proving the G400 is a very good solution and it can be. I also seem to have picked up a reputation for being "biased" or a "moron" as a few of you have unjustly put it. Keep in mind that sometimes my speech is limited in the space of the timeframes I am given to publish an article at times and all bases can't be covered on each review. As I do the next project I will try to address this every matter briefly but publicly clarify a few things that I intend to discuss here.

So, this whole AGP overclocking project has proven to me that much more teseting is needed to provide the readers with more "accurate" information. Although my test rig indeed fails on both my G400's with this particular motherboard, the same hardware is working AND failing for others as well. What does this mean? It's POSSIBLE which means alot more than just saying it will not work. I wil credit you all with that. This needs to be clarified. As to saying that the card is very good at this setting on THIS motherboard, I disagree. I've seen better success on other motherboards (which is yet another factor I wish I had time to cover) but not on the P3B-F test bed I used. I've had people confirm issues and success stories but it was absolutely not a matter of everyone having no problems while I was the only one failing. If that was the case, I'd have ripped out my findings and fixed them ASAP. That wasn't the case so I still stand by my testing that the G400 isn't a 100% success rate or one of the best for that matter. How can I verify that anyone else is just as problematic or good? A ton more of testing across many BX platform that do 133MHz bus speeds. Unfortunately, I don't have the testing done just yet but I will try to see what I can do. In the time being I will publicly note the concerns that every has had about the G400 series.

Some of the factors that I'll be considering or not paying attention to:

The memory isn't a big problem since that's not what causes the video card itself to fail. Many of the cards do fine on my test memory so it should work fine for the G400 regardless if it uses AGP space or not. If the use of bad memory caused crashes during heavy AGP usage, the card would at least boot AND the GeForce cards would begin to fail as well. Changing from Crucial (which is damn good memory so whoever said it was bad, have a reality check) shouldn't be a big deal so I'll stick with that brand.

Card to card margins may be the reason we're seeing differences. Not all cards are created equal and this may be the reason for my findings. They are both production cards (granted early ones) and may have come from a slower batch of core parts causing them to fail on my testing. Basically, bad luck since others have parts thar run fine at some ungodly speed. There is also room for exploration as maybe the AGP mode at which the board runs fine but comprimises other things we haven't looked into, to work.

Try the testing across many platforms. This is an obvious improvement to the test suite but would have a TON more testing required IF done correctly. I don't just slap a HDD on from one to the other. I use a very controlled environment and wouldn't dare swap disks like that. My lab is run the right way and not ghetto style like other popular "lets market this product so everyone likes us" sites might do to get inaccurate information up quicker. Sorry for the blatant kick at some of the other sites but it's true. Anyone who has met me knows I could give a crap what name is on the product as long as it delivers. I enjoy working with most of the companies and I may be closer to some than others but that's not been my fault. Some companies, like Matrox, choose to keep things under a tight lid and provide "matrox fansites" with more information that I get simply because it makes more sense.

BIOS settings were downgraded to "safe" settings when I changed video cards to at least get the card to post without having to blame a bad BIOS setting for keeping the card from posting. The G400's I tested didn't post period. No matter what settings I used, they refused to post. Many have claimed I had settings that were too aggressive initially but I had stayed up long nights trying to work around this possible BIOS issue and it just wan't happening.

I hope you all can see from my point of view now that I have shared my thoughts. I'm not out to get Matrox nor am I trying to kiss anyone's butt. I'm merely trying to explain where I'm coming from and why I said the things I did. Things do need to be clarified but I wouldn't exaclty put the findings into the garbage either. I hope this at least makes some sense to you guys and gains back a little respect. Sorry if this appears to ramble but I had very little time to devote to this post and I have to get back to the grind here at the lab. Good day to you all.

-Silvino


[This message has been edited by Silvino (edited 24 March 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Silvino (edited 24 March 2000).]

[[SITH}PELADO]

I've had the G400 and now i own a G-400 MAX...both work fine at 133 in an asus P2-B and at 140 with a P3B-f without changin anything in the bios...so i can't belive what you are saying...mostly because matrox cards where the first that could work without a problem at 133 when other cards could't....

[mkaresh]

On my MB, a Soyo SY6BA+IV, a G400 and G400 Max performed much the same. Stable at 133 at 3-2-2, fairly stable at 144 at 3-3-3, 2D only at 150. For some reason worse at 140 than 144.

Now for some more interesting stuff. I jsut recently decided to add another stick of RAM. This led to stability problems. I returned one stick which had crashes all by itself and got a second. This one is fine by itself. Together with the other stick (both Kingmax PC133), I have crashes unless I retard my latencies, i.e. I have to set 3-3-3 at 133. Otherwise 3dmark2000 always goes poof by the second test. Any ideas what's going on here?

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PIII 500e @667
Soyo SY6BA+IV
Iwill Slotket II
G400 32MB Max
Nokia 445Xi 21"
and POS 14"
Aureal Vortex Superquad
128MB PC133
IBM DPTA 20.5GB 7200rpm
Toshiba 8/40 DVD