Hi, I'm going insane with system crashes, registry errors, and general chaos with a matrox g450 AGP and a matrox g450 PCI together, running 4 monitors. Does anyone have experience with these cards, and better yet, find a STABLE alternative to them???? I need a dual monitor output AGP card, and a dual monitor output PCI card, each for under $100. I don't really care about great graphics or speed, I just want 1) ease of installation, and 2) STABILITY. Thanks, Ken
Ken, The obvious question is what is your operating system? If it's Win98 or WinMe, then I strongly urge you to upgrade to Win2000. XP might also be good, I just have a hard time with the first releases of any Microsoft O/S (having been burned too many times in the past). If you are already using Win2000 then there is another problem (drivers?), it's not your two cards.
Hi Magna, Thanks for your help. I had been using three monitors with the two cards, and added a fourth today. There are some serious problems with the g450 PCI. It would not display its second monitor until I removed the AGP card and went through a clean install of the drivers, changed BIOS settings, etc. After much help from tech support, I finally got all four monitors to run with the g450 AGP/PCI combo today, and then all hell broke loose on my machine. I was getting registry corruption errors, memory errors, blue screens, random reboots without warning, failure to boot, you name it and it went wrong. Even errors in internet explorer. They all promptly ceased (and had 10 perfect boots in a row) when I removed the g450 PCI card. What tipped me off was that the blue screen errors reported fatal exceptions in the memory sector taken by the g450 PCI. Yes, this was a win98 (1ed) environment, and I have win2k pro installed on a separate partition in my machine, but I am saving it until I have my configuration finalized and feel confident that it is stable, as I want to keep that win2k partition as pristine as possible and don't want to have to do a clean install. That is why I have a win98 partition still alive. I also have a driver problem with my shitty ethernet card (dlink) that causes win2k to hang for about one minute upon booting up (I started a separate thread for this if anyone reading this can help). Tech support has not returned my calls or e mails on this one (buyer beware). Are you running the g450 AGP/PCI combo in win2k??? Is it stable??? Thanks Ken
I finally got my G400MAX AGP and G450 PCI working stable with Windows NT. Here's a link that helped me fix my problem: http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/Forum1/HTML/006942.html Also, I noticed they were getting really hot and locking up. I added a fan and it's been solid since. Good luck, jpb
Ken, this was a win98 (1ed) environment, and I have win2k pro installed on a separate partition in my machine, but I am saving it until I have my configuration finalized and feel confident that it is stable, as I want to keep that win2k partition as pristine as possible and don't want to have to do a clean install. I also have Win98 and Win2000 on separate partitions. Recommend that after getting W2K setup and configured to your liking you immediately either back it up to tape or to 2 CD-R's (you'll need 3 folders and all their sub-folders: "\Documents and Settings", "\Program Files", and "\Winnt"). Then if some network or video driver causes havoc you can always boot into Win98, delete those 3 W2K folders from there, and restore your clean W2K installation from the tape or CD. That is why I have a win98 partition still alive. I recommend you keep it alive for ever and ever. There are many things you can't do from within W2K (because of it's restricted hardware and file access) that you can do from Win98. I also have a driver problem with my shitty ethernet card (dlink) that causes win2k to hang for about one minute upon booting up I went thru a variety of NIC's until I finally ponied up and got two 3Com's (I've got two computers). Hated to spend the extra money x 2 but they are the most stable and compatible NIC's I've ever used. Are you running the g450 AGP/PCI combo in win2k Wish I could help you here but I've only got one dual-card in each computer. I know there are a number of people on this board who have that exact combo so, hopefully, someone will jump in. Good luck.
well magna, you were right. installing the two g450's under win2k pro went without a hitch. as an emergency last resort to get my computer running so i could trade, i popped for two nvidia geforce2 dual cards, only to install the first one and find out 1)the max number of monitors any combination of the nvidia cards can support is three, and 2)under win2k, you're stuck with the annoying stretched screen, and cannot get separate resolutions and desktops with these cards, unlike the matrox cards. this angered me very much. especially since i was looking forward to playing quake3 on four screens. so, i went back and retried the g450's, this time with win2k. apparently there are some serious problems with the g450's under win98 1st release, but after i did a clean install of win2k they went in with no problem, and i didn't have to try any voodoo shit to get them to go in. i have yet to try higher resolutions under win2k (1280 and higher) because i'm kind of afraid, since that was when all hell really broke loose under win98. i was also getting the BSOD about 1 in 5 boots in win98 from the matrox powerdesk alone, but there's been no problem at all with 2000. looks like matrox has the low-end multi-monitor market cornered. thanks for your help, ken ps - as far as backing up win2k goes, why don't you just create a backup file with the win2k backup tool? it took me about five minutes to create a backup file, and copy it to a separate partition on my HD (with ATA100). since i don't have a tape drive and don't want to get one, all i need to do now is find a utility that will let me cut the 1.1GB backup file in half so i can get it onto two cd-r's - any ideas???
Ken, Glad to hear things went well (they've been known to do that occasionally...) as far as backing up win2k goes, why don't you just create a backup file with the win2k backup tool? it took me about five minutes to create a backup file, and copy it to a separate partition on my HD Personal preference, but I like my backups to be on tape or CD-R so that if my HD goes kaput I'm not lost. find a utility that will let me cut the 1.1GB backup file in half so i can get it onto two cd-r's There's lot of "splitting" type tools out there, go to shareware.com and search for "splice" and you should find some. looks like matrox has the low-end multi-monitor market cornered. ATI also has a good cheap dual-monitor card called the Radeon VE (I've got the Matrox in one of my computers, the ATI in the other!). It works fine in Win2000 and Win98, but not WinNT. Since the Matrox does work in NT it has that advantage.