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I imagine Haig, taking full advantage of his dual displays, reading my post on one screen and voiding my warranty on the other.
Back when I was testing my new G400 and posting the results in every forum I could find, I received a couple of requests to up the clock speed of the board with Powerstip for some additional testing. I'm quite familiar with the risks of overclocking, and if I fried a circuit or two, and that's what's causing my problem, well so be it.
However, I and others have suspected that Powerstrip may have reset some of the boards firmware parameters, as I have heard it has done with other boards in the past. Although I'm a bit of a hardware junky, and I really should learn this stuff, when I begin reading about Matrox clock parameters, my eyes glaze over and absolutely none of it makes a bit of sense to me.
Currently, my system locks in certain circumstances while in OpenGL-based games. After a clean install of Windows 98, and I have done three of them in recent days, all seems well at first. Then benchmarking reveals a loss of a couple of fps in Quake2's demo1 and a 4-5 fps difference from comparable systems running the Q3A demo. If I don't reboot after leaving an OpenGL game, and access something like Windows Explorer instead, the game will lock up hard the next time I attempt to play it and every time afterwards.
3DMark99 Max, both in benchmark and demo modes, appears to run fine, although attempts to run the Matrox demo have left me with a black screen and trying to open Expendable leaves me back at the desktop with the following error message: "Fatal error: the BDF is missing." This may be unrelated.
I ran mxinfo and recorded every number I thought was relevant, in hopes that someone who understands this stuff might take a look at them and tell me if anything is off spec. Here goes:
RAMDAC speed: 340 (Now that looks odd.)
CLK freq:
VGA: SClk:34/MClk:34/GClk:34/WClk
blank)
HiRes/2d: SClk:34/MClk:34/GClk:34/WClkblank)
w/4mb: SClk:0/MClk:0/GClk:0/WClkblank)
w/8mb: SClk:0/MClk:0/GClk:0/WClkblank)
3dModes: SClk:1/MClk:1/GClk:1/WClk:1
3d w/8mb: SClk:32749/MClk:32749/GClk:32749/WClk:32749
(Note: all values were reported as MHz, except, I believe, that last line.)
Does anyone see anything wrong? Am I on the wrong track? Should I be reporting something else? Would a BIOS flash possibly fix this? (Will Haig send me a new BIOS if I offer to put him up in San Francisco if he chooses to fly out here? It's a little chilly now, but things should warm up in September.)
Matrox G400 G4 + MDHA32GR (Vanilla)
PIII 500 MHz @ spec
AOpen AX6BC
Turtle Beach Montego A3DXstream
SCSI Everywhere
3Com PCI NIC and ISA 56K Modem
My apologies for the long, boring post and the blantant attempt to bribe Haig.
Thanks.
Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net
Back when I was testing my new G400 and posting the results in every forum I could find, I received a couple of requests to up the clock speed of the board with Powerstip for some additional testing. I'm quite familiar with the risks of overclocking, and if I fried a circuit or two, and that's what's causing my problem, well so be it.
However, I and others have suspected that Powerstrip may have reset some of the boards firmware parameters, as I have heard it has done with other boards in the past. Although I'm a bit of a hardware junky, and I really should learn this stuff, when I begin reading about Matrox clock parameters, my eyes glaze over and absolutely none of it makes a bit of sense to me.
Currently, my system locks in certain circumstances while in OpenGL-based games. After a clean install of Windows 98, and I have done three of them in recent days, all seems well at first. Then benchmarking reveals a loss of a couple of fps in Quake2's demo1 and a 4-5 fps difference from comparable systems running the Q3A demo. If I don't reboot after leaving an OpenGL game, and access something like Windows Explorer instead, the game will lock up hard the next time I attempt to play it and every time afterwards.
3DMark99 Max, both in benchmark and demo modes, appears to run fine, although attempts to run the Matrox demo have left me with a black screen and trying to open Expendable leaves me back at the desktop with the following error message: "Fatal error: the BDF is missing." This may be unrelated.
I ran mxinfo and recorded every number I thought was relevant, in hopes that someone who understands this stuff might take a look at them and tell me if anything is off spec. Here goes:
RAMDAC speed: 340 (Now that looks odd.)
CLK freq:
VGA: SClk:34/MClk:34/GClk:34/WClk
blank)HiRes/2d: SClk:34/MClk:34/GClk:34/WClk
blank)w/4mb: SClk:0/MClk:0/GClk:0/WClk
blank)w/8mb: SClk:0/MClk:0/GClk:0/WClk
blank)3dModes: SClk:1/MClk:1/GClk:1/WClk:1
3d w/8mb: SClk:32749/MClk:32749/GClk:32749/WClk:32749
(Note: all values were reported as MHz, except, I believe, that last line.)
Does anyone see anything wrong? Am I on the wrong track? Should I be reporting something else? Would a BIOS flash possibly fix this? (Will Haig send me a new BIOS if I offer to put him up in San Francisco if he chooses to fly out here? It's a little chilly now, but things should warm up in September.)
Matrox G400 G4 + MDHA32GR (Vanilla)
PIII 500 MHz @ spec
AOpen AX6BC
Turtle Beach Montego A3DXstream
SCSI Everywhere
3Com PCI NIC and ISA 56K Modem
My apologies for the long, boring post and the blantant attempt to bribe Haig.
Thanks.
Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net
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