G400 Max shows fine vertical lines on desktop

[fredc]

I've got a G400 MAX, Compaq MV900 19" monitor, AMD 700, MSI 6167 MB, 128MB
Micron memory, SB Live!, Adaptec 2940UW,
Network card (shares IRQ with G400),
and Netcommander ISDN adapter, IDE DVD,
HP 8200 CD/RW ...

The problem is that my monitor on the standard desktop at all resolutions and refresh rates shows fine vertical lines
that make the display a bit fuzzy. Graphics
are ok, but text, windows, background, icons
etc are all fuzzy.

The lines are in a vertical pattern's offset
by about 1 pixel on both the X & Y axis. This gives a diagnol looking pattern repeated
hundreds of times from the top left of the
monitor to the bottom right.

Funny thing is, this same thing happened
with my Matrox Millennium II card and the
MV900. I replaced the MMII with an ATI
all-in-wonder pro and it disappeared. That
was on a previous PC. I forgot about that
and I bought the G400 for my new PC. The
only thing that has been in common between
them is the MV900, again, its rock solid
with the ATI card (in another PC).

Matrox support suggested changing my IRQ's
as #10 is shared with my network card. Win98
won't let me change them so I just pulled
the card and no difference. Everything works
ok other then this annoying distortion.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.
-FredC

[boyracer]

I too have these funny vertical lines on my monitor (Mitsubishi Diamond View 1995) with G400, but they seem to only appear on the left and right sides.

I'm not really sure, but I think it has something to do with Moire patterning. In fact, instead of making text fuzzy, it seems to make it more in focus where the lines exist. I read in my monitor manual that Moire is actually an indication of good focus level, so......

I don't have any idea how to get rid of them, so I'm no help here, sorry. If you have Moire adjustment on your monitor, try fiddling around with those settings. Didn't really make any difference for me so I guess I'm stuck with it, oh well.

Cheers.

[Jcole]

My problem is quite the same but in my system the amount of the (randomly colored) lines are increasing all the time, and after a while i can't see anything on the screen. Then window$ 98 (tm) crashes and i have to reboot the machine.

Usually windows won't even start after the reboot and something like this is displayed on DOS screen (i have finnish version of windows so the next message ain't likely to be correct) : 'protection failure, press any key to reboot'

I've tried to change IRQs and disable different graphics related shit from bios and powerdesk with no results. Re-installing windows and g400 drivers time to time. Tried different monitor-drivers and re-installed and tried different versions of directX and checked for incompatible directx driver files.

I'm quite happy with this matrox product, although I'm bit pissed off with the current situation. My g400 max ain't overclocked and the main chip ain't hot or cool, just warm like it "should?" to be.

Any ideas?

[fredc]

I just tried adding another monitor to see the problem happens on another one. I added my Mag 17" as the primary and the MV900 19" as the secondary. The Mag looked solid as a
rock and the MV900 was still fuzzy as the
2nd monitor.

It has to be an issue with the MV900 and the
monitor. Now, it gets interesting.

When I removed the 17" MAG and went back to
the MV900, Win98 didn't plug & play the monitor as an MV900, instead it was just
seen as a "plug & play". Now at 1600x1200
& 32M the display is ok, its still fuzzy
if I set it to 1200x1024, but I can deal
with the 1600x200. Previously, none of
the resolutions made a difference.

What is actually getting tweaked in the
monitor settings when a plug & play monitor
is being recognized? It obviously makes
a difference.

-FredC