Matrox G400 MAX retains #1 spot at PC World :-))))))))

[Mr. Cold]

Check it out <A HREF="http://www.pcworld.com/top400/article/0,1361,17717,00.html">HERE</A>.

Still number one, and beating out all the Video Game Kiddie Thradacaster 9000 (mocking the silly names they come up with for all those new gaming cards) cards after over a year on the market.

[LAMFDTK]

Whats # 2, oh no, Not that card. Kind of makes the whole rating silly.

[Greebe]

Joel I think we're having a run on old news this weekend!

Come on Matrox, poop something out will ya, we're getting BORED!!!

[Arsa]

They have "Mixed-media business rating" which makes rating fine. Actualy, they are making monthly re-rating on iXBT now, where viper II is very good. I mean you take other things but "3D rate" in consideration.

Oh, and another quote:
"Dedicated, speed-hungry gamers will be dissatisfied, however"

Well, yeah. ;-)

That's actualy a pity that S3 doesn't make video cards anymore. Trio64 was very cool.

[paulcs]

I never finish reading a PC World or PC Magazine review without a bit of a headache. Their videocard coverage is simply awful, and I believe their methodology is suspect at best.

Just for the record, I agree with their conclusions. I think, for most users, the G400 continues to be an excellent board. Although I am personally fond of the Quake3 benchmark, I suspect it doesn't mean a thing to most users.

A couple of years ago, one or the other previewed the G200 and claimed it had full OpenGL support. Then, over the next several months, they reviewed it, giving it their big award, and included it in a couple of roundups. Each time, they claimed it had full OpenGl support. How come their G200's shipped with a working ICD and ours didn't?

While I think it was legitimate to heavily weigh price and business performance, they spent an awful lot of time on gaming performance when looking at the other boards. They appeared to have used only 800x600 in their testing, which is just plain silly when looking at boards this powerful. How they managed to get them to run so slow at such a low resolution is beyond me. Maybe they should have disabled Vsync.

I bet they used shipping drivers for all these tests, and they practically admitted this invalidated their S3 results.

I think the coverage of the S3 was a diservice to the reader. This board has been plagued with driver issues from day one, and given the shakey ground S3's graphics division currently stands on, I doubt it is going to get better anytime soon. It may be a fine piece of hardware for the money, but there is a very good chance its driver problems will never be resolved.

A couple of weeks ago, several members of the Savage equivalent of the MURC requested that S3 allow them to trade down their Viper II's for Viper 770's (Diamond's TNT2 Ultra). To their credit, S3 agreed. It was a little sad.

The inclusion of the Rage 128 Pro seemed gratuitous and silly. It just seemed to me that this lousy board, which has been superceded twice with superior lousy boards, was used because it was the only ATI product they had lying around. It is just a high clocked Fury, and, again, ATI has had two subsequent major releases. I thought including it instead of the MAXX or Radeon was pretty goofy. Not really covering the only good thing about the board, its DVD playback, was even goofier. Recommending it was flat out dumb.

What the heck is Viper Racing? Is it a driving sim? Who benchmarks with sims?

Sorry about the rant. PC World and PC Magazine really get under my skin. God, I think they do a lousy job.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net