Kyro II ? Should I or shouldn't I?

[Victorian]

Just wondering how those who picked up a Kyro II are feeling about it now that they've had it a while (and yes, I've read the stuff posted before).

The reason I ask is that my MAX is getting a bit 'long in the tooth' gaming wise, I don't trust ATI's drivers and don't trust Nvidia's graphics quality and don't see any other choices in the vid card market at this point in time.

I figure that those who've picked up a Kyro have had a bit of time to do more than bench their cards and will have developed a feel as to just how stable the cards are and how well they perform on a day to day basis.

Now it should be noted that I don't play a lot of first person shooters. The 3d games I play tend to be mainly sports sims like NHL 2001 or RTS games like Earth 2150 although I have been known to dabble with Deus Ex.

System stats:
dual boot Win 98se and Win 2k (mainly use Win 2k)
ASUS CUBX mother board with a PIII 800 (slightly overclocked to 896)
NEC FE950 19" monitor
512 megs of pc 133
G400 Max
60 gig IBM, 20 gig IBM, 20 gig IBM, 20 gig Quantum (mix of ata 66 and 100)
Pioneer dvd rom
HP burner
Acer cd rom
D-Link nic for my home network and ADSL modem
zip drive
Soundblaster X-Gamer 5.1

[Victorian]

Forgot to add that I generally run my monitor at 1280 x 1024.

[tictoc]

Hi. I see you play sim stuff,the only thing bad about the Kryo is it will not run Microprose F3 due to the 2d/3d flipping of the display and Kryo have said they will not be releasing drivers to support it. The info about it can be found on www.alphaf1.com in the f3 link. Hope it helps.

regards tic

[Nuno]

Ok, Victorian, if you don´t mind the boring read, you may take a look at a little "review" made by a former G400 win2k user...

http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum3/HTML/003959.html

[Victorian]

Nuno:

I already read that marvelous review. I was just wondering how you and the couple of other folks here who'd picked up the card were feeling about it after having it for a couple of weeks.

I take it that you're still happy with it?

[Nuno]

Yes, I´m very pleased with the Hercules 4500. IMHO it´s all G550 should have been, minus dual-head features and a faster RAMDAC.

I´ve no trouble in recommending it, specially for a win2k user. I´ve yet to find a single issue on daily 2d usage. No crashes, no corruptions, no errors. Very smooth. It also performs very good on RTS games (have you tried z-steel soldier?). Keep in mind that you still have to use powerstrip 3.0 to force direct3d and opengl refresh rates on win2k. Not a big deal, really, but why the hell can´t they put it in the drivers?

But just to be on the safe side why not wait for some G550 benchmarks to see if they suit your needs? (I´m expecting around Kyro I performance...)

[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 23 June 2001).]

[Tom]

Nuno,

Considering the G550 specs and your VERY detailed and informative review,
(You don't work for Hercules, do you? )
it's getting harder to find a reason to NOT
pick up a KyroII....for the time being.


------------------
MatroxG400MAX..and some other stuff

[Novdid]

Well I like this card very much. Even though I had some troubles with it in the beginning.

No big issues though, they were easy to sort out.

Well if you play strategy, have you tried Emperor: Battle for Dune??? Lovely game. But...the game seems to heavily rely on T&L (you have to uncheck the T&L box in the advanced options, default is "checked") and the fact that the game has an overdraw factor that equals the impressive number 0, makes the game choppy from time to time. But it is very playable at 1024 at max settings.

As you can figure out, there are a few games that don´t like the Kyro, Emperor being one of them. BTW Emperor is much better than Earth 2150.

[Victorian]

Well, took the plunge and picked one up. Just finished installing it in Win2k (haven't done so in win98 yet)and I think I've noticed a bit of strangeness. Scrolling seems a bit less smooth and there's something about the screen rewrites that seems a bit off. Not sure I can put my finger on what seems off though. Perhaps it's a bit slower than my MAX?

The desktop seems to be pretty much as sharp as my MAX though. Text at 1280 x 1024 (my usual working resolution) seems a crisp as the MAX.

Well, I'll see how it goes.

BTW, where are some good boards to hang out on to keep up on tweaking and drivers and so on? Any suggestions?

[Victorian]

I am *not* happy. First game I try it out on, NHL2001, no go. Artifacts like crazy and the higher the resolution I set the game at the more the screen squishes to the center. The only way I can actually get the game to use the full screen is to set it at 640 x 480 and it doesn't matter what size, artifacts that cover almost the whole screen.

Doesn't look good.

[Wombat]

What drivers are you using? I've heard that there have been big leaps of improvement from the in-the-box drivers.

[Victorian]

Tried the newest drivers from Hercules. Doesn't matter though as the card is packed up and going back tomorrow. Nothing but trouble on my system I'm afraid.

Couldn't get the 98 drivers to install at all, system kept freezing during the reboot.

On 2000 the couple of games I tried out had nothing but problems (i.e. the ones I wrote about in NHL 2001 earlier).

Spent a couple of hours trying to fix things without any luck and then spent a couple of hours trying to repair the damage to my system from uninstalling the card. Ended up having to do a repair install in Win 2k and it's still not 100%.

Ah well, it was worth a try. Perhaps I'll hold my nose and try a Radeon. I'm a glutten for punishment.

[Nuno]

You could at least try another one, you could have got a defective card...

[Admiral]

Or who knows what settings he enabled from the drivers and the game didn't like it.

Now, there's a thing I like about this card, the ability to have individual profiles for each game.

Could also be DirectX, no ?


There's only two things I don't like about this card :
1) Bad overclocker (but the price and performance compensate for that)
2) not having an uninstall utility that completly removes all the files the drivers have installed

[Nuno]

The unninstaller in on the add/remove programs on control panel.