G400 Max & MSI 6195 (K7 Pro) - Any suggestions

[jtsurf1]

Hi all,

First post. Just built a new computer last night and hope people would please recommend the best software to install for my video card (i.e. Powerdesk, Powerstrip, TurboGL, Matrox Tweak Utility, etc..). Here are the specs:

AMD Athlon 700
MSI 6195 (K7 Pro)
Matrox G400 Max DualHead
128 MB HSDRAM (PC133)
Creative 5x DVD Rom drive
Diamond Fireport 40 SCSI Card
Microtek E6 scanner
Iomega 2 gb Jaz
Creative 4224 CDRW
Netgear FA310TX NIC
Aureal SQ2500 sound

I am going to be using this system to play NHL 2000, Photoshop 5.5 image editing, and DVD playback out to TV.

The only thing I have installed so far are the 5.52.015 version of Powerdesk from matrox's website.

Not sure what to use for DVD playback (probably use whatever came on the CD-ROM with the vid card), any other suggestions?

I've never played Unreal or Quake (because my old system was a 233 and it was too slow), so I might try some of those games and have read about OpenGL problems with this card - any suggestions here.

To overclock or not to overclock, if yes then what software to use?

Anything else you can think of will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

jt

[Pace]

The drivers you have will let you play any game out there - Unreal and GlQuake are somewhat problematic on any video cards though. Unreal Tournament, Quake3, Quake2 and Half-Life will all run nicely on your lovely system (The first and last will probably be better in D3D though).

The low resolution performance of the G400 in OpenGL did have problems with triangle throughput but either running at high resolution eliminated this ot TurboGL fixes it. If you are running at high res then TGL may not benefit you - I presume you will be using high res because of Photoshop.

Hope this helps,

Paul.

[jtsurf1]

thanks Paul

that does help

I plan on trying to run everything at 1024x768 32bit (including Photoshop, although once I get a new monitor I will probably bump it up to 1152x864)