G400 Misidentification Problem

[hmsrolst]

I put one of my G400's (single head, 16MB) into a new system and it refused to boot at all. On another forum it was suggested that if I had used the card in a machine that I hibernated that it could have corrupted the bios. I attempted through several means to restore the bios and the system then booted, but it will only run with the standard Windows VGA driver at 16 colors. When I install a Matrox driver, the card is identified as a G400MAX and I get black box artifacts. As a result it's running at 360Ghz which I assume is responsible for the problem. I've tried using the restore utility and I've tried using different bios's to get the card to be correctly identified, but the card is still identified as a MAX and doesn't work. Anything I can do here to get my card to work? Thanks.

[Damien Green]

How about using Powerstrip to downclock the card or the Matrox overclocking utility - not ideal I know but it may help.

[SteveC]

Wow... 360Ghz!

You need to force flash the G400 (non MAX) BIOS, but I can't remember how off the top of my head, and the search isn't working. Try asking how on matrox' tech support forums.

[OZZIE_NO_GOOD]

oke you sloud read this treaht it helped me so hopes it can help you http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php...highlight=PINS

[hmsrolst]

I've tried using the overclocking utility to "underclock" the GPU, but because one of the boxes is blacked out, I'm really unsure what I'm doing. I slid the top bar down to 83% assuming that would lower the speed to 300Mhz, but it made no difference. Does that sound like the right approach?

[Rags]

Originally posted by hmsrolst
I've tried using the overclocking utility to "underclock" the GPU, but because one of the boxes is blacked out, I'm really unsure what I'm doing. I slid the top bar down to 83% assuming that would lower the speed to 300Mhz, but it made no difference. Does that sound like the right approach?

1. your card isn't running at 300 anything Mhz. No how no way. You are confusing ramdac specs with chip speeds.

2. Just because your card is being recognized as a Max does NOT mean it's running at Max speeds.

3. Have you tried uninstalling the Matrox drivers and reinstalling some new drivers?

Rags

[hmsrolst]

Rags, I've tried several different Matrox drivers--as soon as I change from the Windows VGA driver (and I assume, higher than 16 colors), I get the artifacts. I'm sure I don't understand the workings of a video card well enough to respond to your first two points, but I'm pretty sure it's not a driver issue.

[hmsrolst]

Thanks for those who helped me, especially the suggestion to go to the tech support forum which I have used but forgot about. The resolution: the card was an IBM OEM card and the Matrox bios recovery utilities won't work on them--I found a bios update on the IBM site and now the card works fine.