RMA process in the UK?

[DukeP]

I live in Denmark, and I had no problem getting a replacement for my G400MAX when it upped and died on me. Didnt cost me more than 3.5£ for the stamps, took less than a week.
I got an RMA through Ireland (?).

No hassels either; even though the fault appeard at random.

Best wishes to the Matrox Tech troops!

~~DukeP~~

[nojay]

I bought this G200 Marvel second-hand through Ebay, and Matrox are still willing to RMA it. I am both pleased and surprised (but especially pleased...)

I *think* I know now what happened, after puzzling over the sequence of events. This may serve as a warning to others.

The machine I was running the card in is a power-hungry monster with only a 250W power supply (BX chipset mobo with 2 Celeron CPUs with active Peltier coolers, 4 SDRAM DIMMs (1Gb), 2 SCSI controllers plus sound card, TV tuner card and network card plus FDD, an IDE HDD and a DVD/CD-RW drive). Add in to that mix a G200 Marvel card driving a breakout box and I reckon the PSU was sagging a little.

I installed the card (replacing a DH G400) and ran the installation sequence. During this I managed to capture video successfully in test mode, showing the card was working OK at this point. What blew it out the water was an attempt to change the DVD region coding of the MJPEG hardware accelerator from R2 (British) to R1 (American), as all my DVDs are R1. At this point the software wanted a reset. I am guessing somewhat here, but with some insider knowledge of how these sorts of things are done in similar embedded systems.

My guess is that the region coding change required a write to the BIOS EEPROM on the G200 card, to modify a variable setting which is used to control the MJPEG coder/decoder. When this happens the current draw to the card increases briefly but violently. My PSU couldn't keep up, and the write op failed as one of the voltage rails (probably the +5V rail) sagged. Unfortunately the failed attempt to write to the EEPROM also corrupted its contents, trashing the whole BIOS. After the reset, when the system interrogated the video card via its fixed BIOS memory address, there was no valid response and hence the mobo's Power On Self Test (POST) reported there was no card available.

I attempted to fix this using the recover.exe utility, but this did not succeed, hence the requirement to RMA the card.

The moral? If you're changing settings on one of these cards, either make sure your PSU is up to the mark (or more) or reduce the load on it by, say, removing some memory DIMMs or temporarily disconnecting some cards or other stuff (like neon-effect lights or hovercraft fans).

BTW the RMA saga is still not quite over -- I received an email with a.pdf attachment, and instructions to fill it in and send it (with the original card) to the Ireland address. Unfortunately they haven't actually *given* me the address...

[Wombat]

You can probably still reflash the card off of a self-booting diskette, or using a PCI card as your primary video card.

[nojay]

I tried that with Matrox' own recover.exe utility. It ran partially but then blew out; booting into MS-DOS with a Millenium I PCI card I got:
-------------------------------------------

1.Unknown MGA?? DeviceID: 519
Found G200AGP
Calc SUM:18
Read SUM:f6
Loading default BIN file g200AGP.bin...

Calculated Pin Sum 86
E2Prom Pin Sum:86

Pin is valid, re-using...

Pins were damaged, information salvaged:
Unable to continue because of a bad PCB#
PCB#: 818
SUBSYSID#: ff04

-------------------------------------------

The recovery disk had a file called 818 (along with a pile of others). I think the 519 device referred to might be the Millennium I PCI card.

There was another website with other Matrox BIOS software tools, run by a guy called Greg and hosted by a Polish university, but the links are now dead and I don't know where any of these tools are now.

I'll RMA the card (once I get a real physical address in Ireland) and hopefully that'll be that. I'll be more careful during software setup.

[Wombat]

gbm's site is still up. Look! http://grafi.ii.pw.edu.pl/gbm/matrox/