The
Gigabyte GA-6CX and GA-MG400
i820
Motherboard and G400 Based Graphics Card - A package
Deal
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| GA-MG400 |
| Matrox
Injected - Home Grown By Gigabyte |
|
| Now
this was an interesting proposition,
Gigabyte asked us to take a look at their
new line of graphics cards, specifically
designed to work with their
motherboards. Not only that, they
have these graphics products designed with
two of the top graphics chipsets in the
marketplace, the G400 from Matrox and the
Voodoo3 from 3dfx. We received a
16MB AGP G400 based card for our
testing. Here are the goods on it...
(click
for a closer look)
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GA-MG400
FEATURES
256-bit
DualBus architecture
True 128-bit external bus to video memory
Full AGP 2X/4X device with Multi-threaded
Bus Mastering
True Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
Vibrant Color Quality2(VCQ2)
Rendering
32-bit internal precision specially enhanced
for multi-texturing using 32-bit source
textures
32-bit Z-buffer including 8-bit stencil
buffer
Symmetric Rendering Architecture
DirectX 6, PC 98/99, Broadcast PC,
DirectShow, OpenGLcompatible
High speed integrated RAMDAC (up to 300MHz)
with UltraSharp RAMDAC technology
Display up to 2056 x 1536 @ 32bpp
Industry leading 3D feature set and
performance
Bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic
filtering
2D
ACCELERATION
Benchmark-winning
2D performance optimized for true color
operation at high resolution
UltraSharp RAMDAC technology for highest
quality analog output
Full acceleration of all GDI and DirectDraw
functions
Linear frame buffer
Programmable, transparent BLTter
Linear packed pixel frame buffer
32-bit ultra-fast VGA core
ADVANCED
3D FEATURES
3D
Rendering Array Processor delivers up to
three times the speed of the MGA-G200
Floating Point 3D Setup Engine with
dynamically re-allocatable resources
Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
Single cycle multi-texturing
Vertex and table fog
Specular highlighting (any color)
True color ARGB Flat and Gouraud shading
Vibrant Color Quality2(VCQ2)
Rendering
Texture sizes up to 2048 x 2048
Filtering support Including
11 level mip-mapping support
Bilinear Filtering
True eight-sample per pixel
trilinear filtering
Anisotropic filtering
Alpha blending & Z-buffer support
Guard Band Clipping
Single, Double or Triple buffering
3D-image effects combined with no exclusion
conditions
Sort independent (full scene) anti-aliasing
Vector/edge anti-aliasing
Hardware dithering including dithering of
LUT textures
DRIVER
SUPPORT
Windows
9X, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000
DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectVideo, and
ActiveX
OpenGL ICD for Windows 95/98 and NT
If
this looks familiar it is because the
GA-MG400 is all G400 through and
through. The board design is the same
as a standard Matrox
product with the exception of the cool
looking blue heatsink that Gigabyte is known
for. The board is also made of blue
FR4 which again is one of the few
distinguishing marks on the GA-MG400.
Other than that this board looks, smells and
tastes like a G400.
The main difference to note is that this
video board has no VGA BIOS on it. It
calls upon a Gigabyte Mainboard BIOS that
has the VGA BIOS built in. Here
is a link to the list
of Gigabyte Motherboards that support the
GA-MG400.
In
addition, take a look at the drivers that
are shipped with the GA-MG400...
Setup
and Installation...
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