Matrox Millennium G400 DualHead review
Last update 99-10-01.
The article is currently under construction
and will be expanded in near future.
I finally received my Millennium G400 DH board from
Matrox in September. Here are some of my experiences and judgements.
The box
The board arrived via UPS, very well packed by Matrox
and in good condition. Inside the big shipping box was a little OEM package,
containing the card, installation CD and a cable with two TV connectors.
There was no manual, since it wasn't the reatil package. One week later
I received the other disk, normally coming with retail G400. The CD contains
some simple graphics applications (Picture Publisher, Simply 3D, etc.)
and the game Expendable - special G400 edition.
Also, the cable supplied with the board is NOT a
board-to-TV cable. It's just an adaptor cable. You still need either RCA
(cinch) cable or S-Video cable to connect the TV set.
The board
The board, PCB#906, is used for most of G400 models,
excluding the Marvel. It can accomodate the G400 chip, MAVEN (video encoder
and secondary RAMDAC) chip, 4 or 8 32Mbit SGRAM memory chips and the EEPROM
serving as BIOS storage.
The AGP edge connector is compatible with both 2x
and 4x boards (operating at lower supply voltage).
The 32 MByte DualHead board is fully populated,
so you can find all the chips in place. Other versions are missing some
parts. SingleHead version has no MAVEN and 16 MByte versions have only
4 memory chips soldered (the other 4 chips are placed on the bottom side
of the board).
There are two heat sinks on the board. One, big
and impressive, serves the G400 chip. The second, small one, is glued to
the MAVEN chip.
Unlike in the Max version, in the standard version
there is no fan, only the big heatsink.
The board also contains several connectors, so some
extra stuff like MPEG2 hardware and Flat Panel output can be added in future.
There is no memory expansion connector, since the memory bus operates at
very high frequency and no expansion modules/sockets could stand it. So,
if you get the 16 MB board, there is no possibility to upgrade it to 32
MBytes.
The memory used on my board was 6ns SGRAM from Samsung.
Thus I was worrying about the possibility to tune the board to some higher
frequency.
The CDs
The first CD contains all the driver and intallation
software, G400 technology demo and DVD player software. The second one
is filled with software bundle - another copy odf DVD player, some simple
graphics software and special, G400 enhanced edition of Expendable.
Hardware installation
The hardware installation was trivial. I opened my new
ATX case, removed my old Mystique G200 and replaced it with the new G400
board.
I didn't bother to use the installation CD for driver
installation. I simply took the newest PowerDesk download I had on my hard
disk and run its Setup program. Everything worked OK.
In a few minutes I had my system up and running.
For those interested, here is its configuration:
- Epox MVP3G-M, AMD K6-III 400,
128 MB SDRAM (big thanks, AMD!)
- Matrox Millennium G400 DH (thanks,
Matrox!),
- Creative SoundBlaster Live!
Value
- Quantum EX6.4, old 12x CDROM,
old FDD
- New, nice and noisy ATX case
(made slightly less noisy by putting a 12 Ohm resistor in series with the
power supply fan).
Tuning
Well, I wanted to make my graphics subsystem to be as
fast as possible. To my surprise, the driver enabled AGP 2x mode (couldn't
get it with my G200). Good.
Next, I tried the most aggressive settings of MVP3
chipset. Another surprise - G400 works well with all the dangerous options
on (fast memory decoding, read and write pipelining, etc.).
It was high time to tune the G400 itself. It wouldn't
be very wise to tell you how I did it, so please don't ask me to share
this secret. Anyway, after another 40 minutes, I had my "Max Lite" (half
of the copyright on the name is mine :-)), running stable at 200 MHz MClk/150
MHz GClk. Due to slow memory, it was not possible to push the board beyond
204/153, so I stayed at the default Max-compatible settings. Since the
heatsingk was quite warm, for increased stablity I attached the old Pentium
fan to the G400 heatsink. It is slightly too big - 486-size fan would fit
there much better.
The results
I find the board excellent for all my needs. The demo
programs downloaded from Matrox are very impressive. In fact they impressed
me so much that I am planning to write a small demo using bump mapping
feature of G400. You may view the first benchmark results
here.
Speed
I am not a Quake player, so I don't care too much about
this kind of speed. But even for those who use their computers mainly for
shooting some unfriendly creatures there is a good news. Matrox is doing
its best to make the G400 the excellent choice for gamers. Their latest
invention, TurboGL, is supposed to change the image of Matrox boards as
no-gamers choice. Here is some more information.
OpenGL and TurboGL
Well, the famous Matrox OpenGL ICD is not exactly the
fastest one under the sun. OpenGL is a monster, so I am not surprised that
the monster in its Matrox incarnation is not moving very quickly. The "ordinary"
OpenGL ICD is supposed to be good and complete first, and then fast. Unfortunately,
for gamers the ICD should be fast and not necessarily good or complete.
To solve the conflict, Matrox is coming with an interesting solution. General
applications will be handled by standard OpenGL ICD, and games will be
accelerated with the new TurboGL ICD, which I suspect to be Matrox implementation
of miniGL. TurboGL is installed separately for each supported game, and
the supported ones are all Quakes and alikes. The TurboGL uses floating
point SIMD instructions, so it works only on Pentium III (using SSE) and
newer AMD chips using 3DNow! And it's really fast, even on my K6-III. How
fast? Well, I couldn't measure it cause there is no TurboGL yet. How do
I know it's fast? Well, I can run Quake3 for a few seconds before it freezes
with the current beta version.
Expendable
I personally hate all these killer games, so Expendable
doesn't impress me. What impresses me are the stunning graphics effects
made possible by G400. So even if you don't like to shoot the invaders,
just have a look at the beautiful water surfaces, flames and flares.
DVD player
After a few days of using the G400, I installed the
DVD player software coming with the board. Despite the fact I didn't have
the DVD drive at the moment, the installation was quick and flawless.
Three days later I installed the DVD drive in my
computer. The player took care of it immediately, and in a monent after
installation I could watch the DVD movie. The DVD software included with
G400 is simple and easy to use, much better than some stuff I had a chance
to try 6 months ago on some nVidia Riva TNT boards.
Unfortunately, my satisfaction is not quite complete.
During movie sequences with fast frame changes, some frames are lost on
my system, and there are also some slight breaks in sound. There is something
wrong with the software running on my K6-III 400. So I would say that the
DVD player is definitely useable, although not without minor flaws. Go
for it if you don't want to spend a lot of money on the standalone DVD
player - it works. Not excellent, but very good - I would give it a score
of 9 out of 10. Anyway my son is very happy watching the Microcosmos on
our computer's screen
DualHead and TVout
Will test it as soon as I move my TVset closer to the
computer...
Overall impression...
...is very good so far.