Gigabyte motherboards having trouble recognising G400?

[Nuno]

I´m sure all of you know that Gigabyte GA-MGA400 thing, a G400 clone that only works with gigabyte mobo´s. Ok, that´s fine for me, BUT I have updated my Gigabyte 7IX bios to F2d and on reboot I was in plain VGA mode and my Millennium G400 was recognized as a GA-MGA400... YUCK! Reflashing F1 bios cured it.

I understand the f2d bios is beta, but is it that impossible to distinguish between a GA-MGA400 and a real Matrox G400? What does this mean, I can´t use any Gigabyte bios that has GA-MGA400 bios built in?

Anyone using a Gigabyte board and having trouble with the G400?

[Scytale]

Didn't the GA-MGA400 BIOS reside in the mainboard BIOS? That would explain something...

[Nuno]

Scytale: Yes, I realize that the GA-MGA400 only works with gigabyte mobo´s because the video card hasn´t a bios, it is on the mobo bios. But the mobo should recognize the GA-MGA400 and the Mill G400 as diferent cards, right? I e-mailed gigabyte about it, but I still didn´t get a reply.

[Ashley]

Regardless, both cards will have the same PCI vendor and device ID, which is how these things are usually recognized.

Gigabyte doesn't write its own BIOS or drivers for "their" G400; they are provided by Matrox. The GA-MGA400 is not a "G400 clone" - its a G400.

Just use the BIOS designed for your mainboard: F2 is just F1 with a G400 BIOS.

[Nuno]

I don´t know much about Gigabyte bios release policy. Do you mean they have different bios releases, one with GA-MGA400 support and one without it? That would be fine. What I fear is that the bios from now on always have a G400 bios built in, overiding the Matrox bios.

I have no problem having the card recognized as a GA-MGA400, it´s just I bet Gigabyte´s driver releases will always be 2 steps behind Matrox.

[Ashley]

I had understood that the newer BIOS (including the beta) addressed issues relating to the G400 "add-on" card, rather than the mainboard proper.

There's no reason why Gigbyte's drivers or BIOS would ever be behind Matrox's, but they should have a BIOS option to disable the onboard VGA BIOS...

Their G400 w/o BIOS is odd, to be sure. As with their "DualBios", blue PCBs, and "turbo" jumpers, Gigabyte seems to be having trouble finding a niche for themselves...