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| Installation
/ Setup - The GA-MG400 |
| And
it walks like a G400 too... |
|
We'll cover the
details and performance of the Graphics side of
this package from Gigabyte first and then finish
up with a look at the heart of the combo, the
GA-6CX motherboard.
The GA-MG400
ships with drivers based on Matrox's 5.26
release. Here's a shot of one of the
properties tabs.
Once
again, the heart of the board is a G400,
according to the drivers. The card
installed in a snap and the tools suite that
Gigabyte bundles with the card is an identical
set of Matrox "PowerDesk" tools only
with Gigabyte logos on them. The drivers
are easy to use and provide good control over
image quality and features. The on board
VGA BIOS features of the motherboard we used,
were pretty much non-existent. You just
install the card and it boots up like any other
board. There are no settings in the
mainboard BIOS for VGA functionality beyond the
standard stuff that you see in AMI or Award BIOS
today. One thing to note is that you
absolutely have to use this card with a Gigabyte
motherboard. It will not work in any other
system.
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| Test
System |
| Specs
and Setup |
|
Full
Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 533B
overclocked to 600MHz. (supplied by Outside
Loop Computers),
Gigabyte
GA-6CX i820 Motherboard,
128MB of 800MHz (400MHz. DDR) Techworks
RDRAM, WD Expert AC418000 7200 RPM ATA66 Hard
Drive, Gigabyte GA-MG400, Kenwood
72X CDROM, Win
98SE, DirectX 7, Gigabyte GA-MG400 Drivers
Matrox Version 5.26
It
is important to note that we used 800MHz. RDRAM
on these tests and took full advantage of the
memory bandwidth offered on the i820 platform of
the GA-6CX Motherboard.
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| Overclocking
- The GA-MG400 |
| Stability
under pressure |
|
The
GA-MG400 is an excellent overclocker and we ran
it full out at 140MHz. core frequency and
186MHz. memory frequency, without a single
lock-up throughout our battery of tests.
The heat sink that Gigabyte uses is a fairly
heavy duty piece of aluminum and performs
well. This is a passive cooling setup with
no fan however. I feel very comfortable
stating the following benchmarks at this
overclocked speed since I feel it is very
achievable for most of you. The default
core speed of the GA-MG400 is 126/168, as with
all G400 cards not of the "MAX"
variety.
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| Benchmarks
- The GA-MG400 |
| Quake
3 Arena, 3DMark2000 |
|
We
need to make one thing very clear on these
benchmarks. The drivers we used for the
GA-MG400 were based on the 5.26 rev. of the
Matrox reference drivers. These are the
only drivers that work with the GA-MG400 at this
time. All newer Matrox drivers including
the new "TurboGL" drivers do not work
with this board. We asked Gigabyte to see
what they could do about getting their card
compatible with Matrox reference
drivers. We'll keep you posted with any
further updates on this. For now the
GA-MG400 has to fight with one hand behind its
back. Here are our results...
Something
to note on the following Quake3 tests.
These test were run on the drivers that were
shipped to us with the GA-MG400. Again,
these are not the most current base OpenGL ICD
drivers form Matrox that Gigabyte has used in
their driver suite. As a result, the
scores that follow, reflect the performance
scale in line with the driver revision. If
Gigabyte releases new drivers based on the most
current Matrox source for the Turbo GL Driver
and the new base driver version 5.41, they will
most certainly unlock the total potential of the
G400 chipset that is used on this card.
Also of note, is the fact that we are testing a
16MB vrs. some of the 32MB card benchmarks you
may have seen. The driver version
definitely has a larger impact
however.
As
expected, less than stellar performance.
We'll update these scores if Gigabyte sends in a
new driver revision.
Just
for yuks, here is the obligatory screen shot
from Quake3 Arena.
Click this image for a closer look. It is
a 1024X768 JPEG with very little
compression. The file size is 300+K
Let's
move out to the GA-6CX Motherboard benchmarks !
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