Tweet
For those of you who have not seen the following threads, I wanted to bring this all together for you all to be aware of.
It has been suspected by me for a couple of weeks now that Powerstrip has a severe compatibility issue with the G400 cards. This suspicion has manifested itself heavily over the past couple of weeks in several threads here.
It would seem that using Powerstrip to overclock your G400 could lead to a damaged BIOS on your card. Somehow PS is inadvertently changing some sort of registers in the BIOS, causing it to run at incorrect clock rates.
Symptoms of this are benchmarks showing no improvement or a loss of performance. Also PS will sometimes seem to report strange numbers when trying to use it after the bios is corrupted.
Threads date back a couple of weeks when this problem first started rearing it's head.
The most pertinent thread is this one, in which the author of Powerstrip participates, and many people talk about how their cards were damaged by Powerstrip.
People who have been able to reproduce the problem include the head of Matrox tech support, myself, and other beta testers, not to mention many of you…
While Ashley continues to resist the possibility that PS is doing this, we have been told that G400 support will be removed from PS until this issue can be resolved.
http://forums.gagames.com/forums/For...ML/002376.html
This is the latest person to run across what I believe to be this same problem. Read his post. If you have symptoms like him, you could have a corrupt BIOS.
http://forums.gagames.com/forums/For...ML/002456.html
To check your bios, go to this site, and download a utility called G4set. It does not work as an overclocker, but it will accurately report the clock speeds and divider settings your card is running at.
http://grafi.ii.pw.edu.pl/gbm/matrox/
Just run G4set with no parameters, and it will report your status.
The numbers that matter the most for this check:
Sclk - should be at 252.00 (301.5 MAX)
G:d - should be at 1/2 (both cards)
G:f - should be at 126 (150 MAX)
M:d - should be at 2/3 (both cards)
M:f - should be at 168 (201 MAX)
W:d - should be at 1/2 (both cards)
W:f should be at 126 (150 MAX)
If any of these numbers are off, you have a corrupt BIOS.
Ant should have a fix posted on his site within the next couple of days.
It will consist of a BIOS file that you will be able to use to flash your card back to it's original settings. This will remove your serial number, and void your warranty, however, since Matrox cannot create a custom bios file with everyone's serial number. The cost of overclocking…
If you made an emergency bios recovery disk for your G400 (first thing I did when I plugged it in…really
), you can use that to fix your bios without loosing your serial number.
My suggestion to everyone is not to use Powerstrip until this issue has been resolved.
And if you intend to try any other overclocking utils, MAKE A BIOS CRASH DISK!
It has been suspected by me for a couple of weeks now that Powerstrip has a severe compatibility issue with the G400 cards. This suspicion has manifested itself heavily over the past couple of weeks in several threads here.
It would seem that using Powerstrip to overclock your G400 could lead to a damaged BIOS on your card. Somehow PS is inadvertently changing some sort of registers in the BIOS, causing it to run at incorrect clock rates.
Symptoms of this are benchmarks showing no improvement or a loss of performance. Also PS will sometimes seem to report strange numbers when trying to use it after the bios is corrupted.
Threads date back a couple of weeks when this problem first started rearing it's head.
The most pertinent thread is this one, in which the author of Powerstrip participates, and many people talk about how their cards were damaged by Powerstrip.
People who have been able to reproduce the problem include the head of Matrox tech support, myself, and other beta testers, not to mention many of you…
While Ashley continues to resist the possibility that PS is doing this, we have been told that G400 support will be removed from PS until this issue can be resolved.
http://forums.gagames.com/forums/For...ML/002376.html
This is the latest person to run across what I believe to be this same problem. Read his post. If you have symptoms like him, you could have a corrupt BIOS.
http://forums.gagames.com/forums/For...ML/002456.html
To check your bios, go to this site, and download a utility called G4set. It does not work as an overclocker, but it will accurately report the clock speeds and divider settings your card is running at.
http://grafi.ii.pw.edu.pl/gbm/matrox/
Just run G4set with no parameters, and it will report your status.
The numbers that matter the most for this check:
Sclk - should be at 252.00 (301.5 MAX)
G:d - should be at 1/2 (both cards)
G:f - should be at 126 (150 MAX)
M:d - should be at 2/3 (both cards)
M:f - should be at 168 (201 MAX)
W:d - should be at 1/2 (both cards)
W:f should be at 126 (150 MAX)
If any of these numbers are off, you have a corrupt BIOS.
Ant should have a fix posted on his site within the next couple of days.
It will consist of a BIOS file that you will be able to use to flash your card back to it's original settings. This will remove your serial number, and void your warranty, however, since Matrox cannot create a custom bios file with everyone's serial number. The cost of overclocking…
If you made an emergency bios recovery disk for your G400 (first thing I did when I plugged it in…really
), you can use that to fix your bios without loosing your serial number.My suggestion to everyone is not to use Powerstrip until this issue has been resolved.
And if you intend to try any other overclocking utils, MAKE A BIOS CRASH DISK!
Comment