Unlike the Mystique, the G200 chip set doesn't harbor the same disappointments in terms of its commendable feature set. Neither does it suffer the incompatibility issues of the m3D. It's actually a darn fine chip with all the bells and whistles, which gamers have come to expect in 1998. What we're dealing with here is full AGP 2x support for high-res textures, a fully fledged 3D feature set including goodies like tri-linear filtering, per-pixel mip-mapping, fogging and anti-aliasing as well as a superb 32-bit rendering pipeline capable of producing some of the finest visuals seen to date on a PC in real-time.

As you'd expect installing the Mystique G200 wasn't all that tough, we're talking the good ol' pulling off of the cover type affair (which admittedly results in a few cuts here and there but nothing major- Sharky). Shove it in firmly into an AGP slot, tighten it with a screw, hook up some cables and voila, you're good to go. Driver installation wasn't troublesome either, it's just a matter of shoving in the provided driver CD and… well I you probably know the rest (Anders can teach you potty training too- Sharky).

Booting up with a freshly installed graphics board is always interesting, you'll be happy to know that the G200 lacks an annoying Video BIOS screen at boot saving precious time (or it's there but I just never saw it). Once in Win98 (yeah, forget about Win95 now) you've of course got the choice of multiple resolutions, and boy do you have some to choose from with a G200. Ranging from 'shag-tastic' 640 x 480 @ 8-bit, all the way up to an impressive 1920 x 1200 in 24-bit color with only 8Mb of framebuffer required (the G200 supports a massive 16Mb max.). If that wasn't enough you've got support for virtual desktops all the way up to 2048 x 1600 - very handy when your monitor can't handle the highest resolutions. On my 19" Adi the 230Mhz RAMDAC on the Mystique G200 does a fine job keeping the refresh rate high, handling anything from 60 - 200hz @ 800 x 600 or 60 - 85hz @ 1600 x 1200, not bad. Not bad at all.