Introduction Is there anything left to be said about the Matrox Millenium G400 graphics card? In fact, quite a few outstanding items remain to be examined, and instead of repeating what has already been said, I will endeavor to review those features that have not received the full attention of the media at large. That said, I will be talking about a few things, namely: how to cool the G400's efficiently, its TurboGL drivers, and finally its Overclocking ability.

Cooling the G400

The Matrox Millenium G400 is equipped with a heatsink large enough to be seen in the photo above. It is, quite simply, the largest heatsink that I've ever seen on a graphics card to date. On the other hand, no fan is mounted on the heatsink. Cooling of the graphics engine beneath the heatsink is therefor a passive event. In order to experiment with this situation, I performed a few tests by installing 2 different fans on the G400's heatsink. Thus, I tied installing the fan which accompanies the Vantec heatsink model SK5026FD, in all likelyhood the KD1205PFB1-8 fan, with a capacity of 10.2 cfm. Next, I installed the famous YS Tech 26cfm fan which is found mounted on the Global Win FEP32, and FDP32 coolers in particular, as well as many others.

The Cooling Tests

In order to see if it was possible to noticeably lower the operating temperature of the G400, I worked it for a period of an hour for each test. The tests were conducted under Windows 98 and Quake 2, with the Demo2.dm2 demo running for an hour straight. All tests were performed with the casing closed. The RT2 thermal sensor supplied with the Abit BX6 revision 2.0 motherboard was used to measure temperature, with the aid of the Hardware Doctor program. The fans used were those previously mentioned.

next page: the cooling tests