Here´s another G550 review

[rubank]

Here

rubank

[CHHAS]

Ouch! The G550 is neck and neck with the G400Max

[Inray]

>> G550 is neck and neck with the G400Max

Yes in 16bit, but see what happens in 32bit

[CHHAS]

Hurrah, G550 is slower than G400Max in 32bit color

I know this isn't a gamers card, but Buttcasting(tm) aside, there seems to be no reason for current G4x0 owners to upgrade.

Betatesters, please tell me that the people of GamePC has been hitting the phat pipe too often, and the card at least performs better than a G400Max ...

[roadie]

this is pretty much what i expected, but i would really like to see the overclocking benchmarks between a g400max and a g550

[ayoub_ibrahim]

I won't be seeing off my G400MAX just yet!

[ph0rk]

>> this is pretty much what i expected, but i would really like to >> see the overclocking benchmarks between a g400max and a >> g550

And those of us with G550's would like to do those tests. But it's kind of hard to when the latest Matrox Tweak Util "supports" the G550, but not overclocking the G550. The latest Powerstrip doesn't register the clock rates properly, rather it reads them at half of their actual values.

I can't speak for Matrox, but Entech gave me a canned response about working G550 support in Powerstrip coming sometime after the card hits retail shelves.

If anyone wants to ask them nicely to make a beta version with proper G550 support available so those of us reviewing cards can get some overclocking action in, the e-mail address to send (polite) requests to would probably be support@entechtaiwan.com.

[Guru]

ph0rk check your sig"

[Maggi]

Originally posted by ph0rk
...
The latest Powerstrip doesn't register the clock rates properly, rather it reads them at half of their actual values.
...

Interesting, but not entirely true ... got some more knowledge to share ?



Btw, where and when will you post the review of your G550 ?

[Ant]

I believe one of the latest betas of Powerstrip reads the core speed at half its true value and the memory speed correctly. Mine seems to be running at 133/166. It seems to be able to overclock the G550 although I haven't run any tests yet apart from cranking it up and seeing when graphic corruption starts to occur.

Any reviewer or BB out there runing a G550 with an Athlon and Windows 2000? If so can you get any form of hardware acceleration? Anyone getting the G550 to default to AGP 4X?

[K6-III]

Why can't you overclock through the registy like you can with the KyroII??? It shouldn't be too difficult.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by CHHAS
Hurrah, G550 is slower than G400Max in 32bit color

No wonder, just take a look at the gfx mem bandwidth of those two cards...
And when the bandwidth is that low it will dominate over everything other in 32Bit at decent resolutions - so this result was very predictable.

[2Whyzzi]

Ugh

I don't get it. Matrox puts a TnL unit inside the G550 but doesn't use it for games? What harm can it do to have it enabled?

Anyone know of a registry hack to get it enabled? (I can always hope...)

Whyzzi

[ph0rk]

Guru: Thanks, not sure how I mangled that so badly, but it's fixed now

Maggi: You can believe me or not, but here's a screenie attached of what PowerStrip 3.01 reads the clock rates on my G550 as. Before Ant said that his G550 was clocked at 133/166, I was under the impression that G550's were clocked at 125/166 - the same as a vanilla G400. Hence the half clock rate comment.

What version of PS are you using on your G550, and how well is it working?

I'll be publishing the review at 2cpu. First I need to figure out why all the 3D scores on this thing are 1/2 to 1/3 of what a G400 scores in Windows 2000, but fine in Windows 98. On 2 different PCs.

[Maggi]

Originally posted by ph0rk
Maggi: You can believe me or not, but here's a screenie attached of what PowerStrip 3.01 reads the clock rates on my G550 as. Before Ant said that his G550 was clocked at 133/166, I was under the impression that G550's were clocked at 125/166 - the same as a vanilla G400. Hence the half clock rate comment.

What version of PS are you using on your G550, and how well is it working?

LOL ... sorry, I didn't mean to distrust you, I just wanted to make clear that your experience is not the whole story ...

I actually run PS3.01 beta build 190 and my clock readings are most likely correct (no other tool to verify, but since build 185 I get constantly the same readouts, except for this latest build were Ashley changed the memory clock readout to its actual value rather than the effective values and added that little DDR icon underneath the memory slider)

Dunno if I'm already allowed to talk about it, but I guess it won't hurt anybody if I say that my G550 is a pretty hefty OCer ...

Let me know once your review is up.