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The GA-MG400 uses slightly altered Matrox drivers, including Matrox's PowerDesk driver, which enables you to tweak every little aspect of your display properties. Unfortunately, there are some issues with the driver, which we will cover later. The GA-MG400 also comes with a pretty darn good game bundle consisting of: Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit (the last good racing game in the NFS series), Superbike World Championship, Future Cop LAPD (third person action) and Populous: The Beginning (strategy). While none of these games are blockbusters, they'll keep most gamers happy for quite awhile. It also comes with a trial version of PowerDVD (mediocre but mostly functional DVD playback) and a copy of PowerPlayer SE (a Windows Media Player replacement), but we'd rather see a full version of a better DVD playback program. Specifically, we'd like to see the one that comes with Matrox's own retail cards, which is as good as it gets. Overall, the bundle is excellent, especially for the expected street price, but we'd like to see DVD playback software as well.
Test System
Pentium III 500
Gigabyte GA-BX2000 440BX mainboard
128MB of PC100 CAS-2 memory
Tekram DC390U2W SCSI card
IBM DGVS09U 9GB UW SCSI hard drive
SoundBlaster AWE 64 sound card
Intel InBusiness 10/100 Network Adapter
We used a .22 micron Gigabyte GA-660 Plus TNT2-A based video card for comparison (149MHz/166MHz), running with NVIDIA's Detonator 3.68 drivers.
Quake III Arena demo001 tests OpenGL performance through the scientific use of a rail gun and gibbed body bits. It uses software features such as curved surfaces and high-polygon models to bring your video card to its knees. We tested in Normal and High Quality modes at several resolutions. In HQ mode at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024, the GA-MG400 intermittently suffered severe graphical glitching and an interesting but disappointing kaleidoscope effect. V-sync was disabled.
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