G 400 vs. G 400 MAX?

[Flycat]

Hello everybody,

actually I'm just wondering about the possible 3D-performance gain when replacing my two standard G 400 32 MB DH with a MAXes (I know they're hard to find these days - and BTW: Silence is golden ).

I'm actually running several more recent flight sims on my system and these programs start taking my ageing G 400 to it's limits (O.K., I'm NOT talking about that CPU-greedy MSFS here ). Would an upgrade to a MAX make sense or would the performance increase be negligible? Any real world experience and hints appreciated. Or should I wait for the G 550???

Thanks for all your messages

CU Thomas

If you ever had a Matrox 2D-Desktop you can't go back to that crappy NV**** #@?+!

[Greebe]

You should try OCing your G400 as most will do this at Max speeds. there is a small but noticable difference in proformance between the two.

What speed is your cpu?

[prr]

take a look to http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1315&p=7
No significant difference.

[Flycat]

Hi Folks,

my CPU is a good ol' Intel P III 1 Gig Slot 1 - yeah, one of these white elephants (additionally running in an extraordinarily stable Win98SE install - bluescreens, what's that? ).

Despite it's at first glance "crappy" features (100 MHz FSB, only AGP 1.0/2x on the Gigabyte BX-2000 mobo, RAM just at 3-3-3-timing) it seems to me that this system is still working extremely smooth. I had a Hercules Prophet 4500 for tests in that sys and it's benchmark results blew away several nominally faster O/Ced Athlons on top notch "Gamer Boards" with "Killer-RAM" and "GeF#*@&" video boards.

Unfortunately there was lots of trouble with the Kyro-board (texture errors, flickering, mutilated 2D-icons), finally I had to put my old G 400 back into service again . So I'm still looking for a perfect Matrox solution ...

CU Thomas

AWW! I forgot - my G 400s HATE O/Cing, the slightest turn on the screw makes them going bananas...

Hey, and thanks "prr": Had a look at ya link - really doesn't look like it's worth upgrading to MAXes, esp. for my purposes. So this will save me from some more whining fans in my 'puter ...

[This message has been edited by Flycat (edited 20 June 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Flycat (edited 20 June 2001).]

[Pace]

The MAX will outperform by a fair percentage when using 32bit, or higher res.

P.

[Nuno]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Unfortunately there was lots of trouble with the Kyro-board (texture errors, flickering, mutilated 2D-icons), finally I had to put my old G 400 back into service again . So I'm still looking for a perfect Matrox solution</font>

So do I

About those visual errors, could it be because of Hercules 4500 *minimum* specs?

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">System Requirements

Pentium® II or AMD-K6® and higher or compatible
Available AGP slot, AGP 2.0 compliant
32MB RAM
10MB hard disk space (more to install games)
CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
Microsoft Windows® 95 OSR2, 98 and 2000</font>

Just a thought...

[Flycat]

Hi Nuno,

that's what Hercy-support say as well - but I've seen 4500s running perfectly on stone age AGP mobos. Can't really be the AGP specs. Rev. 2.0 only mainly and finally cleared some very "hard" specs (voltage, power supply, etc.) that had caused problems on earlier AGP implementations (esp. w/ Voodoo and GeForce1 boards). The digital signal processing remained the same.

So i don't believe Hercules when they say "it's your outdated AGP". People with more recent mainboards are facing similar problems so I believe it must be a different issue (software, drivers, what the heck ).

CU Thomas

[Nuno]

Yes, I know it *could* work, but if it doesn´t, you can´t be so sure it´s not caused by that. I don´t think Hercules hasn´t any particular interest in releasing AGP 2.0 as minimum specs if some problems could appear with 1.0