Utility to check cpu and memory clock settings

[Clevor]

I just bought a used G400MAX and am a newbie to Matrox. Where can I get the utility that allows you to see the clock settings on the cpu and memory, and to overclock? The Matrox utility only tells you % overclock.

Also, I've been experimenting with a couple of games and are the observations below true?

1. QuakeIII is hardly playable on my 800 Thunderbird. At 1024x768x32 and everything maxed I get 19 fps. I tried actually playing a frag match at 800x600x16 and eye candy set to 75% and the game was pretty jerky. Same thing with Serious Sam at 1024x768x16 and default settings.

2. Unreal Tournament is surprisingly smooth. It seems as fast as on a Voodoo5, and the colors are very vivid and bright. In fact, I may choose to play the game on the Matrox. But I believe I was playing at 1024x768x16 bit.

3. 32 and 16-bit on the Matrox is very close. Almost like on the Voodoo5.

Now I got pretty good 3DMark benches: 3164 for 3DMark2000 and 1508 for 3DMark2001, with the card set to 1X AGP. It will freeze up games immediately if set to 2X (it's an early 2X card).

If only Matrox can come out with a card that will have the same visual quality but do 60+ fps in QuakeIII at 1024x768x32 maxed, and have FSAA as good as the Voodoo5, and they will rule the world. It's too bad they gave up the battle to NVIDIA.

Of course at the moment, the Voodoo5 will achieve this with a 1.2 gig processor or higher, and has 2D and 3D image quality very close to the Matrox.

[dsp]

Clevor,

I assume that you are talking about the clock speed of the G400. If so this utility is what you are looking for: MGATweak http://www.murc.ws/cgi-bin/dl.cgi?si...l=Mgat120b.zip.

Hope this helps.

dsp

[Clevor]

Is this the right one?

It seems to install some sort of screen saver, and I get a Vdx error or something when I unzip and install it.

[dsp]

Clevor,

I think you just took the Screen Saver from the zip file, right? The program is MGATweak.exe so try running that, it works for me so I can't see a problem. I suggest you read the readme (stupid me for not suggesting this, its easier this way) right in the zip, its the pdf.

Hope I made some sense

dsp

[Greebe]

MGA Tweak only works under Win9X, if your on 2K it won't work

[dsp]

Greebe,

I have it working in 2k. In fact didn't kjliew put in some dll's so that it would work in 2k if you were having problems .

dsp

[DentyCracker]

It does work for win2k.

[Greebe]

Doh!... forgot about that... sorry KJ

[Clevor]

Thanks DSP!

I opened up the right file last night and got the MGA Tweak running. Couple of questions:

1. Does overclocking the card really improve frame rates and performance? It usually doesn't do much for frame rates on other brand cards.

2. What is a safe overclock for the G400MAX with stock cooling? I got a lot of experience and hardware cooling the hot Voodoo5 and Geforce chips, so that should work fine on the G400MAX, which doesn't run anywhere near as hot.

3. Can all G400s be overclocked to G400MAX settings (perhaps with adequate cooling), or is it the luck of the draw? After all, they don't have the 5 ns chips. I imagine once you get up to 150/200 overclock stable, it should benchmark the same.

It's amazing the MAX came with 5 ns chips way back in 1998-99! They were well ahead of their time. Even now, only the Geforce2 Ultra, has faster ram.

[dsp]

Clevor,

Overclocking can improve frame rates but as has been shown elsewhere you might not see the improvment visually.

Safe overclock for a MAX, I'm not sure but at least 160/213 (Core/Mem) should be feasible.

Not "all" G400's can go at MAX speeds but most can (I've had two that could).

dsp

[Wombat]

A TBird 800 is just about matched with a G400MAX, depending on the game. G400's are pretty reliant on the CPU for some things, and so performance scales nicely with CPU speed (but roughly, anything over 850MHz doesn't help a MAX perform faster). However, if you OC the G400, you might want to OC the CPU to feed the MAX power it could then make use of.