Please advise me on G-series

[vitvip]

Hi!

I am currently an almost satisfied owner of G450DH 16MB. I use 1408x1056 resolution with 16-bit color on 19 inch Mitsubishi Diamondtron (I generally prefer CRTs). My PCI Sat-tuner (SkyStar1) overlay window doesn't work in 32 bpp. I guess 32MB version would work fine. I don't play games and even don't plan to ever allow my 4 y.o. son to. Until now I kept trancoding all videos into MPEG2 that SkyStar can decode in hardware and send to TV. But I've heard G-series has remarkable TV-out and want to give it a try.

Here goes a question. I like Matrox and want to buy another card for my 2nd PC. AGP. So I guess G-series suits best. I see G400, G450 and G550 are pretty cheap now. Which one is the best (for me)? I've seen many post elsewhere claiming G400 was the best but looking at the specs cannot undersand why.

Thank you very much.

Regards,
Vitaly

[gt40]

The G400 had a dedicated TV-out chip, the others relied on the GPU.
If I recall, the G400 was also the only one that could boot onto the second head, the others required a primary display attached.

[vitvip]

Thanks, now I see. Before I buy plasma TV G400 is the best. Is it correct that G400MAX is absolutely the best as it has 360MHz RAMDAC in addition to dedicated TV-out chip? However, I guess it has a fan, is it a must? I prefer silent PCs. Or I will not see the difference between 300 and 360 MHz RAMDAC in 1408x1056@85Hz? Thanks a lot!

Vitaly