Second, as we mentioned before, there is no onboard BIOS. The BIOS is instead found on certain Gigabyte mainboards, one of which is required to use the GA-MG400. Gigabyte lists their GA-BX2000, GA-6BXE, GA-ZXC, GA-6CX, GA-6VX-4X and GA-6VXE+ as being compatible and says that more models are coming. We tested using a GA-BX2000, which is a Slot-1, 440BX based board that costs about $110. Installing the GA-MG400 required us to flash the GA-BX2000's BIOS with a GA-MG400 specific BIOS version of Gigabyte's own writing. We expect any motherboard bundled with a GA-MG400 to come pre-flashed, but we were using our own GA-BX2000 so we had to do it ourselves. In any case, the flashing went over without a hitch, and since Gigabyte's motherboards have the Dual BIOS feature, we had no worries about ruining our machine if the flashing went wrong. No matter what happens, we can always use the backup second BIOS. Once we flashed the motherboard, the machine booted up fine as if it had any other G400 inside. In case you're curious, if you put the GA-MG400 in a non-compatible motherboard, nothing bad happens, it just doesn't work.
Third and last, the GA-MG400 uses Gigabyte's turquoise PCB color. Sure, it isn't important, but we've got to admit, Gigabyte's boards look pretty spiffy.
But beyond the differences, the GA-MG400 has a feature set that is identical to its Matrox siblings. It uses a standard .25 micron G400 graphics chip clocked at 125MHz. A 128-bit memory bus runs to 16MB of SGRAM clocked at 166MHz giving a 250-megapixel peak fill-rate. A 300MHz RAMDAC gives extremely crisp and clear images as well as the ability to draw 2D screen resolutions up to 2048 x 1536 in 16.8 million colors at 85Hz as well as 3D screen resolutions up to 1600x1200 in 16.8 million colors without Z-buffering. Hardware DVD acceleration (DVD playback software not included) and environment mapped bump mapping (EMBM pictured below) as well as AGP 2X and 4X are also supported.
EMBM on and off.
