Matrox Mystique G200 review

Last update 99-03-12.

In February I received my Mystique G200 from Matrox. After playing with it for a few days, I'd like to share my experiences and attitudes.
 

The box

The board came in a nice looking retail box. The package contained the board, manual and 3 CDs. All the components were quite fresh (made in January).
Although the board has two TV outputs, the package contains no TV cable, so if you want to connect the TV, you must first buy the cable suitable for your TV set. So far Leadtek is probably the only company which sells the boards (Riva TNT-based S320) together with TV cables.
The notes on the box say that RAMDAC frequency is 250 MHz.
 

The board

Mystique is assembled on the same PCB as Millenium G200 SD and G200 SD. The main difference between these boards is that Mystique has MAVEN (MAtrox Video ENcoder) chip and accompanying circuitry soldered right on the board. As MAVEN is interfaced to G200 chip using the same port as Flat Panel Module, Mystique doesn't contain the expansion connector which is used for TVout and FP modules aon other types of G200 boards. This is the only feature missing on the Mystique, so while you cannot use Mystique with FP module, you surely can add both DVD module and 8MB RAM expansion.
G200 chip is rev. 1 (B), 0.35u. It is hidden under black heatsink.
The board came with BIOS version 1.3, which is mysterious, as two newer versions were available over one month before the board was assembled.
 

The manual...

...is excellent. While I haven't seen the previous versions of manuals for G200 cards, This manual is by far the best one I've seen (and much better than the one which came with my old good Mystique 170. Troubleshooting section contains answers to most common problems, including BIOS failures. Good work, again. The manual is for all the currently produced mainstream boards (G100 and G200 based). It clearly states that all G200 products have 250MHz RAMDACs.
 

The CDs

.. contain all the driver and intallation software, including the version of PROGBIOS running safely under Windows (completely undocummented). Also, three games are there, as promised on the box. I'm not a gamer, so I will not comment on these. Motorhead is the car racing game with nice graphics, which my 10-years old son likes the best.
 

Installation

One interesting point during Mystique installation is that the driver asks you for the country you are in to set the correct TVout standard. Don't be frightened if you don't see your country listed here (mine wasn't). Just remember that for Mystique there are only two TV standards: NTSC and PAL. The simple rule is: NTSC is used in coutries which have 60Hz AC power (USA, Japan etc.), and PAL in all the others (including whole Europe). Simply select USA if your mains is at 60Hz, and any European country (like UK or Germany) otherwise.
 

TVout

Mystique's TV out is the best TV output I've ever seen on a VGA controller, which doesn't mean that it is flawless. MAVEN chip can output both NTSC- (US/Japan) and PAL- (Europe) coded video signal. Moreover, its sync parameters are really compatible with PAL standard (some board makers believe that PAL works at 60 Hz, fortunately Matrox knows that we, Europeans, hum at 50, not 60 Hz). TV image quality is very good. There is no flickering visible while watching the picture on TV. Up to this point everything is OK.
TV output may work at resolution of 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768. What does it mean? As we know, visible NTSC resolution is 640x480, and PAL resolution is 768x576. While I am not a TV expert, I suspect that MAVEN chip temporarily stores a few lines of video signal, filters them and outputs in standard TV resolution. My theory may be justified by the fact that in TVout modes Mystique always outputs non-interlaced video signal at VSYNC frequency of 50 Hz in PAL and 60 Hz in NTSC, while HSYNC frequency varies (but always significantly exceeds the standard NTSC and PAL frequency. Moreover, MAVEN produces interlaced video signal from non-interlaced input, so this beast is really smart.
Despite the good quality of TVout, there are some evident problems with it. First, in both NTSC and PAL modes there is a thick black border visible around the active portion of the screen. This border consumes about 20..25% of total screen size. The screen is not used efficiently and the details are lost during conversion to the resolution falling significantly below the real resolution of TV screen. There is no way to adjust it, so we can do nothing about this problem. OK, we can ask Matrox to improve this, but generallly Matrox is not hearing the user's wishes. Pity.
Another point here is that I don't really understand why in NTSC mode the displayed screen resolution is reduced significantly below 640x480, and why there is no 768x576 mode for PAL output.
 

TVout switching

... is an important feature on any card with TV out. Matrox take a little strange approach here. First, the card doesn't detect the connected device automatically. This makes it impossible to boot on TV screen unless you previously set the output to TV (which, in turn, makes it impossible to boot on computer monitor screen). While in Windows, outputs are switched by Powerdesk in a very convenient manner. Unfortunately, one must select the active TV output, and there are three physically different configs: RCA jack composite out, S-Video composite and S-Video separate. Fortunately if the multisync VGA monitor to the computer, the monitor still displays the image in TVout modes, which makes it possible to fix any mistakes made dduring output selection.
Under DOS, output switching is a nightmare. As far as I know, the only method possible involves BIOS reprogramming using the -maven option with PROGBIOS. I don't recommend this procedure to non-hackers and non-professionals.
 

Overall impression...

...is very good. While Mystique G200 is slightly outdated nowadays, it's still a nice piece of hardware. There is a room for improvements, and the first thing which should be improved are the TVout details.

And besides, thank you, dear Matrox. My son loves the card and the games he can play on our Mystique.