Overclocking G400 with PINs !?!?

[PWM]

Hi !!

I was reading a thread about PINs and flashing .. And I had an idea ..

The PIN-file includes THE information about boards configuration:
Clock speed, DRAM used, DH or not etc. etc.
(And probably timing info for that particular chip & dram ..)

The drivers are installed according to that PIN info ..

Most of vanilla G400s are able to run with MAX timing ..

Could we just reprogram vanilla G400 PINs with MAX-ones ;-)
-> And then the card would believe to be a MAX-card !!!

Perhaps someone messing with vanilla G400 and PINs anyway
could try this out !!!

I think this could be THE way to clock vanilla cards ;-)

Greetings,
PWM - the hobo

[Hunsow]

This has been done since the early G200 days, and maybe before that as well. Most vanilla G400's can not run at MAX speed because of the slower memory. And it is the best way to overclock. Currently i have it clocked at 148/198 and allthough I can get it at 166/200 with MGATweak it still won't run games any faster then with the 148/198 setting in the PINs.

PS Look at my homepage for further details

[This message has been edited by Hunsow (edited 31 May 2000).]

[Darin]

A strange sidenote... I have a G400 vanilla, and played with overclocking, first using the Matrox utility, then the other one (is it MGATweak?). Strangely, after I tried clocking it at Max speeds, it now thinks it's a Max! And no, I don't have MGA tweak running automatically when I start Windows. The help file that comes with it says you have to have the overclocking utility start automatically with windows to accomplish this, but somehow after overlcocking mine a couple times it now just stays at Max speeds. It's actually a bit of a problem... my core can just barely (but not always) handle max speeds... now that summer is here & room temps are a little higher, I get occasional lock-ups in QIII. 2D is fine as long as I'm in 32bit... 16bit overclocked gives me sporadic green pixels. I have a fan on the stock heatsink. Thinking about changing out the heatsink with a better one, or maybe even water cooling if I do that when my cpu upgrade gets here.

[Kruzin]

Overclocking with the PINs has been the hard core way to do it for quite some time. But be aware: It's not something you want to do if you don't understand exactly what you are doing.
And ALWAYS keep an emergency backup/crash disk of you original BIOS nearby...

Darin-
If you used the Matrox tweak util to o/c, the o/c values where written to your system registry. MatroxTweak does not need to be run at bootup for those settings to stick.
If you want to get rid of that o/c, use the Matrox uninstaller to fully remove the drivers (this will remove all registry entried MTweak made as well), then re-install the drivers...

[PWM]

How I ever missed the PIN thing !?!?
- Indeed this has been around for a while ..

I found at MatroX-files pretty good explanation of the PIN -structure
, BUT it's only for G200 ...

OK.. I can figure out the clocks from Hunsows pages ;-)
- But is there somewhere more complete documentation about
PIN structure for G400 !?!?
(.. what those other number are ??)

Also I noted that similar videocodecs are
widely available as in RR .. (And the card has the signals in the header ;-)

Hmmm.. There could be a lot of potetial for hw-tweaking ;-)