The cooling tests (suite)

The cooling tests

As we can conclusively state, the cooling tests turned out quite positive. A substantial lowering of the operating temperature can be noted, as shown in the table above. As you know, the life-span of electronic components is directly affected by its operating temperature, and what we have here is a chance to extend the life of the G400 by simply adding a fan. Another interesting observation, the G400 barely doesn't get any hotter in 2D mode under Windows, as it gets in 3D mode under Quake 2; this is rarely the case with the majority of graphics cards.

Installing the fans

To keep the fans in place, I simply employed a postman rubber band. I slid the rubber band under the edge of the heatsink near the AGP connector, then, twisted it and slid the other end under the rear face of the heatsink near the memory chips. I thus ended up with an X shape across the heatsink. I then slid the fans under the X, making sure that the rubber band was not twisted in order no to come into contact with the fan blades. This makes for an effective temporary situation, but I would not recommend it for a long term solution. The rubber has a tendency to expand over time, and this could conceivably become slack or break. For long term installation, I recommend Nylon tie wrap, such as those used to hold wire conductors together in electronic devices.

The TurboGL drivers

In addition to providing excellent Direct3D performance, the 5.30 driver contains a full ICD for use with all Matrox Millennium G200 as well as all Matrox G400-based cards, across all platforms running on Microsoft Windows 95 or 98. The full ICD solid OpenGL performance will be further optimized on a continuing basis with performance enhancements and increased support for high-end OpenGL applications.

In an effort to offer Matrox Millennium G400-based game enthusiasts an immediate performance increase in four popular OpenGL game titles, the Matrox 5.30 driver also includes an additional ICD, named the Matrox TurboGL driver.

The Matrox TurboGL driver provides Intel Pentium III and AMD Athlon system users with impressive performance increases over the previous driver release1. Gamers can expect a 19 percent increase in Quake II and 31 percent increase in Quake III Arena from Activision/id Software; a 31 percent increase in Half-Life from Sierra Studios/Valve Software; and an astounding 116 percent increase in Unreal from GT Interactive/Epic Games

To obtain increased performance, the TurboGL drivers call to Intel's SIMD extensions as well as to AMD's 3DNow!.

Games, applications, and systems not compatible with the Matrox TurboGL drivers use ICD by default. Appropriate drivers are selected automatically without need for intervention by the end users.

next page: the TurboGL tests