New Bois?

[antdude]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Kruzin:
Losing full screen DOS and BIOS POST displays is a classic sign of a failing BIOS on Gxx0 cards. It's always a good idea to keep an emergency BIOS disk handy.</font>

I never had problems with the BIOS post.

[Surfwienix]

BIOS 2.07 -> v. 2.1-35
BIOS 2.08 -> v. 2.1-35

???

[antdude]

I took a plunge and upgraded my firmware to v2.1-35 today! So far, nothing is broken.

I don't know if I still have the DOS fullscreen since it happens randomly and rarely.

[antdude]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by The PIT:
Antdude Ah the syptoms are failure to inilise the monitor on booting. This occurs radomly then finally the machine will fail to initilise the monitor at all.
If you wire the speaker up you get three nice bleeps saying video card error.
Reboot with the recover disk let it chug away reboot again and the card is fine again.
The card isn't overclocked and has done it in two different motherboards.
I guess it's dying.</font>

Pit, oh! I never had that problem before. That's pretty wacky though.

[Ali]

I have the recovery disk sitting in my floppy drive all the time.

Every 10-20 cold boots my G400 bios dies, and I have to recover it.

Its been running at a 83Mhz AGP bus since I bought it about 2 years ago though, so I cant realy blame Matrox. (use to run it at 100Mhz at one stage).

I think its part of life with Matrox cards. G200s sometimes clear their BIOS for no reason, even when not overclockerd. (Ive had two do that).

I hope the new G550 will have a more stable bios when it comes out. Ill buy it for that reason alone.

Ali

[The PIT]

Antdude Ah the syptoms are failure to inilise the monitor on booting. This occurs radomly then finally the machine will fail to initilise the monitor at all.
If you wire the speaker up you get three nice bleeps saying video card error.
Reboot with the recover disk let it chug away reboot again and the card is fine again.
The card isn't overclocked and has done it in two different motherboards.
I guess it's dying.

[antdude]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Ali:
I have the recovery disk sitting in my floppy drive all the time.

Every 10-20 cold boots my G400 bios dies, and I have to recover it.

Its been running at a 83Mhz AGP bus since I bought it about 2 years ago though, so I cant realy blame Matrox. (use to run it at 100Mhz at one stage).

I think its part of life with Matrox cards. G200s sometimes clear their BIOS for no reason, even when not overclockerd. (Ive had two do that).

I hope the new G550 will have a more stable bios when it comes out. Ill buy it for that reason alone.</font>

Sheesh. I never ever ever had problems with BIOS. Are you sure your card isn't defected? Is this a well-known problem with all G400 cards or something? I feel bad for you guys who have to keep reflashing the BIOS.

[xortam]

I've never had to reflash my Max either, but then I've never o/c'ed my system.

[antdude]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by xortam:
I've never had to reflash my Max either, but then I've never o/c'ed my system.</font>

That's another thing. I don't overclock either!

[Greebe]

I have OC all my cards on occasion and haven't had a BIOS fail, but know those who haven't OC'd ever and they have. Whho knows luck of the draw?

Doesn't matter that much, M will take care of you.

[The PIT]

It started with the release of the version 6 drivers. Matrox released a bios to fix the problem which made life better in the way that it didn't screw every week or so.

[xortam]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by The PIT:
It started with the release of the version 6 drivers. Matrox released a bios to fix the problem which made life better in the way that it didn't screw every week or so.</font>

And how do you arrive at that conclusion? I think its more likely that the problem is that one or more components in the system are running out of spec.

[The PIT]

Easy it was in one of the Bios releases readme files so I installed it. But I can't remember which version it was.

[The PIT]

This is an old link. But this was the BIos version that fixed the problem in theory.
http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum5/HTML/008638.html

[xortam]

Right you are. Here's the release notes for 1.09. Was it ever explained why this was happening and what the fix was?