Gald to be back.

[cpld005]

Well for awhile there I went Gforce (don't ask me why, I don't even know). Got a quick question, I just received my new G400Max and wanted to know people's opinions on what driver set, DirectX version and TurboGL to use on a system as follows. I do play alot of FPS so keep that in mind.

System Specs:
PIII 550@617
Asus P3B-F
Adaptec 2940U2W with 2 Seagate Barracuda U2W 18GB drives.
SB Live! Platinum
3Com 3C905C NIC
256MB PC100 ram
Win98SE with DX7

What appears to be the most reliable, I am weary of running the beta drivers but if it does help Q3A and UT I will consider it. Thanks in advance for any help.

[paulcs]

The 5.50 betas are DirectX 7 capable and apparently have a faster ICD, but they're buggy. Try the 5.41 drivers along with the 2nd version of TurboGL, a separate download. Just when I thought the image quality couldn't get any better, Matrox surprised me.

Matrox recommends you download and install the new UT patch. There's a new point release for Quake3 as well.

If you're using 3Comm's full drivers, and you run into trouble, you should suspect your NIC's drivers. 3Comm has stripped down/basic drivers on their site.

Make sure your SB Live's drivers are up to date.

Open your AGP aperture to 256, as Matrox recommends. (I know. Do it anyway. )

While your in your BIOS, you might as well disable video shadowing and caching.

Very important: The G400 doesn't like sharing IRQ's with other devices. Make sure it isn't sharing with anything *but* IRQ Holder for PCI Steering.

Also very important: The G400 does not like IRQ's below 9. Make sure it's on IRQ 9 or above.

If you have problems, just come back. Someone will be here.

Using DirectX 7 is fine, by the way.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[cpld005]

I knew about the 3com drivers cause they caused a bit of problems with basically any video card, I also got Liveware 3.0, I am glad that Matrox has made great strides in the driver department since I had the regular G400 DH, that's the main reason I left was driver issues with games (especially the problem with Drakan was especially annoying, I bought a TNT2 just to finish it.). I have set the aparture to 256MB, and the G400 is by it's self on IRQ 11, and everything seems fine so far. I was just kinda sketchy about installing the 5.50 drivers. I have another question, my roommate tried to update to 5.41 using the powerdesk uninstaller and complete removing everything from the registry, he had an extremely hard time after he installed the newer driver, his screen would work ok for a few minutes, then freak out, lines all over the place, big black blocks. He went back to 5.30 and everything was fine. What I don't understand is that his machine is excatly the same as mine except he has a PIII 450 and I have an overclocked 550, other then that the systems are identical.