G200 + Epox MVP3-G5 ... not working at all :(

[JCholewa]

Hey. I have a Marvel G200-TV. Just got an Epox SS7 board and when I put the G200 into it and turn on the power, nothing outputs to the monitor. Other video cards work find, and the G200 works fine in other boards, but I just can't get it working with this one.

Help?

-JC

[paulcs]

I would make sure the board is all the way in the slot and properly situated. This is usually a G400 problem, but it would explain your problem. Give it a good push.

If that didn't work, I'd remove all devices except for the video board, CPU, and RAM, just to see if it will post. If it does, start plugging in devices, one by one, until you find the culprit. You could be having some sort of conflict or maybe a power problem.

Good luck.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[JCholewa]

Tried all that. Reseated it many, many times. Tried it sans devices.

I should note that it beeps four times (sort of a dash dot dot dot) when I try to use the Epox board and the G200 together.

-JC

[RAB]

That beep code is for missing video. I had the exact same problem with my Epox MVP3C2 (the AT version of the G2) when I switched processors for a test last week. It turned out that I had apparently loosened the G200 in its slot. Just pulling it out and putting it back in solved the problem for me. Took me a while to figure it out, but it worked.

BTW, whatever you do, do NOT try the 04-12-2000 beta bios upgrade for the MVP3 series boards. It does not work with the G200. It will destroy your Win.com file and make Windows useless. Even after you reload Windows, you will not be able to shut down properly. The Win98SE shutdown patch didn't help either. Just stay away from it until Epox gets it right.

If completely pulling out you G200 and reinstalling it doesn't work, try the G200 in another machine to make sure its working, if you can. Also, the G200 will not work with the latest Matrox Powerdesk 5.52 on that motherboard. It will shutdown anytime you use Direct 3D. So stick with the 5.41 or earlier.

RAB

System 1: Epox MVP3C2/G200/AMD K6-3 400 @ 4x112
System 2: Epox MVP3G5/G400/AMD K6-3 450 @ 4.5x100

[Jon P. Inghram]

I'm running a G200 on a MVP3G5 with the beta bios, and have had no problems at all.

[JCholewa]

The 0309 bios did nothing. I tried the beta bios, it worked. Then I rebooted the PC and it didn't work. And it refused to work again. I reapplied the beta bios again and ... well, I'm typing this message on the G200, but I live in a sort of fear that as soon as I hard reset this PC, the G200 will stop talking to the motherboard. :/

Wish me luck!

-JC

[Jon P. Inghram]

You using ACPI? I have it disabled and APM enabled.

While ACPI made the computer run cooler when idling, it would pop out of standby mode right after entering. That and I had to disable my second serial port with Windoze's device manager, since the BIOS option seemed to make no difference with ACPI on. I think Epox's ACPI support is really botched or something...

Don't forget that Windoze isn't smart enough to figure out if you turn ACPI on or off in BIOS, you have to reinstall. :-(

I'm also using the 5.25 drivers for my G200, that's the only one that will run Theif Gold right and it's also more stable for Halflife too.

[RAB]

Jon,

You guessed right. I do have ACPI enabled in bios. I never gave it a moments thought since its never given me any problems in the past. I've got it enabled on both computers. I'll try one more time with it disabled and see what happens. Whatever happens, I think I need to notify Epox of the problems I've encountered.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll let you know what happens.

RAB

[RAB]

Nope!!

Reformatted, reloaded Windows, turned on DMA, CRASH!!! Says can't read drive c:

This time Matrox wasn't involved. Must be that #@$%ing Samsung drive. I've always had trouble getting it into UDMA mode. The 11/30/99 bios finally did it after some initial problems, but it worked except for the burst speed.

Back to the 11/30/99 bios I go. I give up!!

RAB

Sorry JC, but did you ever get your Epox and G200 Marvel working and stable? I kind of got carried away trying to get my Epox stable. I hope you had better luck. I had the same exact beep code you had and it never came back after I reinstalled the video card. Well, at least that wasn't what eventually killed my system. Let us know what happened.

[Jon P. Inghram]

That sucks. My old WDC UDMA/33 drive seems to work fine as a slave to my diseased Maxtor UDMA/66 drive.

If you've got the space on the drive, I've found that making a small partition just big enough to hold the Win98 CD makes these format/reinstall sessions much less painfull... :-)

I just wish Matrox would officialy announce something about their new cards soon, so I can decide if I should just get a G400 or keep the G200 and hope for better drivers.

[JCholewa]

Perfect. Epox G5 and Matrox G200 are fine with the G200 latest BIOS and Epox beta BIOS.

Granted, I haven't tested 3D games or anything like that, but I'm not really a gamer, so if I have instability there, I won't worry. I'm going to be gradually transforming this PC into an internet access and TV watching machine, and I'll try to get a more top of the line box (eventually, when I'm a tad less poor) for all that gaming crap. <g>

I'm hoping that the G800 (or whatever) impresses compared to nVidia's and 3dfx's at-the-time components. G400 was *so* close to being an all-around superior choice for the market and I would love to go Matrox if it's arguably better than the competition. Else, you'll see me defect to the other guys after three generations of straight Matrox (Millennium, Millennium II, Marvel G200).

-JC

PS: My two Maxtor drives (13.6GB ATA33, 27.6GB ATA66) are overworked but have never given less than 100% in performance and reliability. So pbbbllllt!

[Jon P. Inghram]

I had a V3-3000 AGP in this system not too long ago, and while it did run faster, Evercrack looked like crap so I returned it.

Halflife ran quite good in Glide mode, but it would crash if I tried to drop back to the menu while playing. In OpenGL mode, HL bogged down horribly at complex scenes just like the G200 does.

The V3 did run in AGPx2, unlike the G200, but I'm not sure if it uses busmastering.

[RAB]

Well if you guys got the 4/12/00 beta bios working, I would like to see how you did it. I have not tried it on my MVP3G5 because it was such a miserable failure on the C2.

The flash went just fine, no errors but the reboot was a little strange. I couldn't enter the setup page using delete until it started searching for drives. But it did finally work. Once I got Windows booted, it would not shut down after I loaded the Matrox drivers and switched to DMA on my hard drive (a Samsung VG34323A 4.3 gig UDMA33). When I hard rebooted and started up again, it completely destroyed Windows. I reformated and reloaded Windows and only loaded the G200 drivers (5.52 first and later 5.41) but it refused to shut down again. So apparently, the G200 is the shutdown problem. It would shutdown in VGA mode before I loaded the Matrox drivers - but not after. After a hard boot to get the Matrox drivers loaded, turning on DMA would cause all sorts of file name errors and Windows would not load.

I've tried several times over the last two days with different combinations of drivers and it still won't work. It may be the Samsung drive (which has always been a bit flakey), but since the G200 drivers refuse to let Windows shutdown, I have to suspect them too.

I'm done experimenting with the new bios unless you guys have some ideas. I think I'll go back to the 11/30/99 bios which was working fine except for the hard disk burst speed.

Sorry for the long winded post, but I'm a bit frustrated here. Every bios update I've done before has gone much smoother.

RAB

JC, welcome to the Matrox Users forum. I read your column every day and it is always interesting. Well done!

We get obnoxious sometimes, but we also pride ourselves on being one of the more civilized hardware forums.

[RAB]

JC, I'm glad to see that you are 100% stable. The G200 was never the best choice for high frame rate gaming, but its visual quality was always the best. The G400 is literally twice as fast as a G200 and works quite well for most games at 1024x768x32. Q3 with everything maxxed gets about 22 fsp on a K6-3 450.

I've had a Maxtor 10gig UDMA 66 for about six months now and haven't had a bit of trouble from it. I even have it on the same cable with my Toshiba 8x DVD and it works just fine. The computer's bios recognizes both as UDMA 66 and 33 respectively and DMA in device manager works just fine. That's why I'm so frustrated with the Samsung on my older machine.

RAB