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Ok, I don't know which person I was to preorder this card but I had about 1.5 weeks of hell trying to make it work from boot up.
I uninstalled all things Matrox. My first problem was it would not finish the install of all the desktop utilities. I got around that manually. The most constant problem was that when booting up the screen would go all blocky (couldn't read anything) like the pages were getting corrupted and then lock up. I suspected the Matrox drivers, irq conflict, maybe even my Epox mother board might be lacking since the bios had not been updated my Epox since 12/17/98!!! I swapped system memory, I even bought a couple of new mother boards one was a diamond/micronics c400 and an Asus P3B-F. The symtoms were the same regardless of the mother board. The only way to come up clean every time was to turn off the Graphic acceleration. Yes turn it down to NONE.
Now, I'm ok with this provided some new drivers come out and help me, but the more I thought about it the more ludicrous this seemed. When you spend almost 300bucks for a super dual-head bump mapping 2d/3d card you should be able to use it that way.
I spoke to Matrox level 1 and 2 support. I tried turning of all video caching and the like. I played with the apeture settings. I even removed irq steering handlers because I had two assigned to irq 11 and Matrox thought that might be causing a problem. I don't mean to rant but I even produced a totally clean scsi drive with a clean install of win98 2nd edition and it still went bonkers on me.
The biggest problem with Matrox support was that many of the things they wanted me to try I could not do without being in an accelerated mode. (Power desk is not visible/usable unless some acceleration is turned on).
I have since overnighted my g400MAx to Matrox for replacement because I think I just got a bum card. I've restored my g200 and monster 2 12MB back to their stable glory until I get my g400max back. Please let me know what else it could possibly be.
All drivers for SB live, 2940 SCSI card, Etherlink 3, and USR modem were upgraded to the most current level. I think it was interesting that the problem went accross 3 different mother boards.
The best news is that CompUSA gave me all my money back for the Diamond C400 board I "borrowed" from them. I ended up keeping the Asus board because it does boot up way quicker than my old Epox board did any day.
Thanks in advance for your comments or suggestions.
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[This message has been edited by skeeech (edited 07-28-99).]
I uninstalled all things Matrox. My first problem was it would not finish the install of all the desktop utilities. I got around that manually. The most constant problem was that when booting up the screen would go all blocky (couldn't read anything) like the pages were getting corrupted and then lock up. I suspected the Matrox drivers, irq conflict, maybe even my Epox mother board might be lacking since the bios had not been updated my Epox since 12/17/98!!! I swapped system memory, I even bought a couple of new mother boards one was a diamond/micronics c400 and an Asus P3B-F. The symtoms were the same regardless of the mother board. The only way to come up clean every time was to turn off the Graphic acceleration. Yes turn it down to NONE.
Now, I'm ok with this provided some new drivers come out and help me, but the more I thought about it the more ludicrous this seemed. When you spend almost 300bucks for a super dual-head bump mapping 2d/3d card you should be able to use it that way.
I spoke to Matrox level 1 and 2 support. I tried turning of all video caching and the like. I played with the apeture settings. I even removed irq steering handlers because I had two assigned to irq 11 and Matrox thought that might be causing a problem. I don't mean to rant but I even produced a totally clean scsi drive with a clean install of win98 2nd edition and it still went bonkers on me.
The biggest problem with Matrox support was that many of the things they wanted me to try I could not do without being in an accelerated mode. (Power desk is not visible/usable unless some acceleration is turned on).
I have since overnighted my g400MAx to Matrox for replacement because I think I just got a bum card. I've restored my g200 and monster 2 12MB back to their stable glory until I get my g400max back. Please let me know what else it could possibly be.
All drivers for SB live, 2940 SCSI card, Etherlink 3, and USR modem were upgraded to the most current level. I think it was interesting that the problem went accross 3 different mother boards.
The best news is that CompUSA gave me all my money back for the Diamond C400 board I "borrowed" from them. I ended up keeping the Asus board because it does boot up way quicker than my old Epox board did any day.
Thanks in advance for your comments or suggestions.
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[This message has been edited by skeeech (edited 07-28-99).]