G450 PCI & overlocking

[G400SG16mb]

the AGP G4xx cards handle high AGP speeds like 75MHz pretty well.

Will a Matrox G450 DDR PCI handle high PCI speeds well too? Like 37MHz? Thanks.

[Wombat]

I wouldn't be worried about the video card, I'd worry about your hard drives.

[Malte]

Re: G450 PCI & overlocking

Originally posted by G400SG16mb
the AGP G4xx cards handle high AGP speeds like 75MHz pretty well.

Will a Matrox G450 DDR PCI handle high PCI speeds well too? Like 37MHz? Thanks.

37 Mhz compared to 33 Mhz may not be a big step, but... if you overclock your PCI bus, will your other equipment be able to handle it? Will your PCI soundcard start disturbing sound output? I e.g. have a promise harddrive controller and would never risk data corruption just for slightly faster dragging of windows ;-) I never understood you overclocking people...

[G400SG16mb]

I'm not naive.

[Greebe]

Originally posted by G400SG16mb
I'm not naive.

Then why ask if you already know?

[Malte]

how well do the G400 chips scale?

Originally posted by Greebe
Then why ask if you already know?

This leads me to a more interesting question: how well do the G 4x0 chips scale when using a stronger CPU? Lets say, upgrading from a 800 Mhz class x86 CPU to a 1/1.4/2 Ghz CPU? How much gain in speed can a user expect? This surely makes more sense than pushing the PCI bus.
And unless Matrox greatly enhances its Linux support for the newer chips i will stay married with the G400;-)

[rylan]

My G400MAX seemed to scale up past 1GHz a bit and then there wasn't much if any differance past 1.4GHz.

With a PCI card obviously you'll be bandwidth limited by the pci bus well before the cpu is the limiting factor, so yeah a higher pci speed might help some.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by rylan
My G400MAX seemed to scale up past 1GHz a bit and then there wasn't much if any differance past 1.4GHz.

Maybe. Greebe and I (mostly Greebe) were among the first people to mess around with scaling. Greebe found the MAX stopped benefitting once the CPU was a K7-850 or so. Then again, it depends on how much of your CPU is used by other things.

[Greebe]

For one I've been overclocking cpu's for over 20 years now. Also invented the first commercial GFD for OCing K7's. Was running hundreds of mHz faster than just about anyone else back then. Add to that I was a beta tester for Matrox and pushed the G4x0's to the extreme both in core, memory speed and in bus frequency.

That's how I know.

[DGhost]

of course, it could be pointed out that the PCI Busmastering support on the G450 is far more of a limiting bottleneck than the acctual graphics core or the processor.

edit: clarified broken brain thoughts.