Question on Matrox G450 GFX board (Need Help!)

[Symbolic]

Hi
I have a Matrox G450 GFX dual-head adapter. It is working properly. But there is something strange about this hardware. At the boot-up... just after the BIOS displays the intro information about the RAM and other things... one bottom line of the text dissapears and the letters get in a strange shape. But this is just at the BIOS screen (in the BIOS setup interface everything looks ok. Under DOS and Win2K everything works also great) The board is working but what is that text thing? something to do with the BIOS settings?

I do not mention the driver because it is nothing to do with the driver. (by the way it ia the latest driver)

should I do a bios update?

please share your ideas. thanks.

[Symbolic]

so... no one to help me here...

[Greebe]

I'd say sure go for it, but I didn't have that problem when I had a G450.

[Michel Carleer]

Symbolic,
Do you have by any chance a peripheral in your PC that adds an extension to the mobo BIOS?
I have a problem quite similar to yours: when the BIOS finishes POST and mem, HD detection, each row of text loses the last scan line, so that the lower horizontal stroke of the letter g for example is lost.
What I have discovered is that this happens when my Adaptec SCSI card initializes. Somehow, it is the SCSI BIOS extension that changes the screen format (number of scan lines per row) or the character font.
Michka

[dZeus]

Originally posted by Michel Carleer
Symbolic,
Do you have by any chance a peripheral in your PC that adds an extension to the mobo BIOS?
I have a problem quite similar to yours: when the BIOS finishes POST and mem, HD detection, each row of text loses the last scan line, so that the lower horizontal stroke of the letter g for example is lost.
What I have discovered is that this happens when my Adaptec SCSI card initializes. Somehow, it is the SCSI BIOS extension that changes the screen format (number of scan lines per row) or the character font.
Michka

yup, exactly the same here with an Adaptec 2940UW... though it's not that much of a problem since I don't use textmode

[Michel Carleer]

Well, it's not a problem for me either: As soon as the SCSI card is initialized, W2K kicks in anyway.
By the way, using a 2940 as well.
Michka

[duke_srg]

2 Symbolic

I have the same effect on my G450, but i have the bios from june version update (setup208).
I'll try to update with new bios today....

Just updated to 1.07 (0.33) bios. No changes.

[Ali]

I always had that too. G400 and 2940UW SCSI.

Never realised they were related. Just thought it was a Matrox thing. Also, the G200 didnt do it in the same system.

Ali

[Symbolic]

Question on Matrox G450 GFX board (Need Help!)

I see... so this is waht caouses the problem. It is exactly as you described... letters like "g" and "y" will lose one horizontal line. So it is caoused by my SCSI controllers...

System: ASUS CUV4X-DSL which has onboard dual SCSI controllers.

It is not a problem for me. Even in the text mode (I do not use) it works ok. The event happens just at the very beginning. After the table of the devices in my computer is displayed... every thing becomes normal... and then Win2K comes...

I was just afraid that I have a faulty hardware.

thanks alot guys.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Just noticed that my Asus CUBX does it when the onboard UDMA/66 controller activates too.

[Michel Carleer]

Yes, I suppose the UDMA/66 controller also adds extensions to the BIOS and changes the font or something. However, because it happens when a peripheral initializes does not mean that it is the peripheral that is responsible. It may well be that the BIOS itself does not use the standard font size. The only thing we can tell is that BIOS and peripheral do use different fonts. Which one is the standard one???
Anyway, it is not very important because it does not produce any error or lock-up and only lasts for a couple of seconds at most.
Michka