Matrox G400 Dual Head Graphic Card

I brought a Matrox Millennium G400 and i had major problems with it as my mother board would not communicate with it. i could not play any games or shut the computer down. i now have a SIS graphics card and now no problems with it.

I have had a ton of video card (auction addict!) and at the mo I am running two PC's with similar spec's (P3 600 and Celeron 500) - In one I have a TNT2 Ultra and in the other I have a Matrox. Both cards run V.Well and I cannot fault either, however I always thought the Ultra would be the best of the two.

Here's where I was wrong. I have had great trouble with recent Nvidia drivers for the TNT2 resulting in my system refusing to run DVD's and only playing TV card signals in a window instead of full screen. These problems do not occur when I use the Matrox.

I may be being a bit harsh as the PC in question has been abused and overworded recently! The matrox driver install was clean were as the TNT has had various versions installed.

Basically The matrox is a solid card and compares well to the 'top of the range' model in its class.

The only real alternative seems to be the 'good' GeForce cards.... Im sticking to the matrox till the GeForce is cheaper tho....

I purchased this card two years and six months ago and have not had a single problem with this card! It has performed better than any video card I know of, for its time. It has true bumpmapping, so water looks like water. The number one reason to take on this card at this time in the video card game, would be because it is solid!

I bought my card, a Matrox Millennium G400Max, as a replacement for a TNT1. It turned out to be a good buy, and has served me well for more than a year now. It was the first card on the market to offer support in hardware for a true form of bumpmapping- environmentally mapped bumpmapping, allowing it to give much more realistic results in games written to support this feature. It also was one of the first cards available for the average consumer to support multiple monitors at separate resolutions and color depths on a single card. This last feature was previously available only on specialty products primarily intended for the business segment. With this feature, it became possible to edit images on one screen in a zoomed view, while looking at the finished product on the other, have an internet search page open on one screen, and one of the pages from the result set on the other, to play a game that supports multiple views, with different views on each screen, or play two player games with separate monitors for each player's perspective (no split screen needed here). It provides outstanding color, as well as (now) good driver support, despite still having some minor problems with texture alignment in some games. With the right processor, this card is very competitive with most currently on the market, including some of the newer offerings out there, even in 32bit color. It still offers playable framerates in all current games, even in 32bit colors, and now includes a good OpenGL driver, a former Matrox weakness.

The downsides to the card are that it is extremely processor intensive, so higher end processors are needed to take the best advantage of its capabilites. It also loses 3D performance when taking advantage of the dual-head and environmentally mapped bump mapping features. Lastly, there are now newer and faster cards on the market, several of which now claim support for hardware transformation and lighting, as well as hardware bumpmapping support.

Matrox has also recently announced the chipset's immediate successor- the G450, which takes the same feature set as the G400 and adds some refinements, to include a second built in RAMDAC for the second output and faster and greater amounts of memory, among other things. However, Matrox has stated that this new card is intended primarily for the OEM market, so many G400 users are holding onto their cards while waiting to see what Matrox has for them next.

I upgraded from a Riva TNT video card to a Matrox G400 Dual Head around 6 months ago. At the time I was pleased with the product. It offered much improved performance over the old card in terms of image quality, depth of colours and speed of operation. DVD playback is passable though it very occasionally stutters on my Celeron 450 (300A) - 128Mb system.

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One unusual feature is the dual head connector which allows two minitors (or a monitor and TV) to be controlled simultaneously, enhancing multiplayer gaming (in software that supports the feature) and DVD playback (allowing control of a movie from one screen and playback on the other). It even allows a two screen desktop if you want it.

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Environment mapped bump mapping is supported, greatly enhancing detail and realism in images created with the appropriate software; hardware texture and lighting is not (unlike its newer Nvidia GeForce and S3 2000 stablemates) - effectively putting a processor dependant ceiling on its performance.

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A nice card dating like there's not tomorrow.