Damien Green

A much easier way (if your BIOS supports it) is to boot the NT 4 setup directly from the CDROM. If you go into your bios settings, find the option which specifies the boot device. This will usually be something like A,C or C. See if there is an option to boot from CDROM. If so, set your boot device to this. You also have to ensure that your drive is detected at startup - the easiest way to do this is to go into Standard CMOS Setup, and set each IDE device to AUTO. Insert your WIN NT 4.0 CDROM, Save the bios settings as you quit bios setup and hopefully NT Setup will boot directly from CDROM.

Well, I'm currently running my G400 Max at AGP x 2 (soon hopefully at 4 x when I get my abit K7V on Tuesday). I know of many ofthers who have successfully managed to get AGP x 2. You could try a larger power supply, but if this doesn't work, try: 1. looking for an updated bios 2. Reinstalling windows 3. The latest Matrox Drivers 4. As a last resort, you might consider trying your card in another machine, preferably one with a different MB, see if it then works.

Could be a problem with the AGP interface on your motherboard, Matrox cards run a self-test on bootup to check the stability of motherboards running at an agp 2x or higher. This does indeed sound like a strange problem especially with a motherboard as mature and stable as the BE6 range. However I have heard of problems with the BE6-2. I have an Athlon 800 with Matrox G400 Max and Asus K7M motherboard - agpx2 = easy. Check you're power supply if it can't deliver enough oomph (amps) over the agp slot - the graphics card will fall back to agp x1.

I do agree with z3org on the whole, in general, the higher the speed rating of you're celeron processor, the less you can overclock it. However, I have also found that abit motherboards allow celeron cpu's to run higher with stability than othewr boards I'ved used. Case scenario, I have a secondary machine with a celeron 466. I can easily run this at 586 on my BE6. On my Iwill BS100 I could only ever reach 540 - even though the Iwill would support the same bus speed that allows my Celeron to run at 586 on the Abit. In conclusion, I don't think that this is enough of an increase to warrent a new motherboard. Instead, I would spend the money (and a little extra of course)on say a PIII 550 or an Athlon system (very good machines, my primary macine runs with an Athlon 800 which has given excellent performance). These chips have bigger caches and multimedia instrucion sets (SIMD and 3DNOW) which greatly enhances applications that support them.

Well at the end of the day only the official ASUS drivers will support all of your card's features. Reference drivers are just that - the bare minimum to get the card running. GFORCE cards from different manufactures vary widely, so you only choice is to install your manufactures' drivers if you want to use every feature.

I've also got 256MB it appears that this may be the optimal threshold for WIn 2K. Remeber that the operating system itself uses a hefly amount of RAM before you even think about loading any games.

Possibly, but I think that the philosphy behind DX 8 will more than likely to introduce more features, and fix some bugs ather than optimize existing DX code which should already be by now pretty well optimised.

I think that DOSFREAk has summed it up - the G400 drivers under win2K are very good (I should know - I'm using them) and there is little difference as he points out between Win 2K and Win ME so I'm afraid you need to wait until 3DFX releases drivers that give your card half decent performance.

No, you're loonking at the file versions which start with 5..... I can assure you that you have DX 7. There is no way that you could have DX 5 it isn't even compatible with NT 4 let alone Win 2K. Don't worry there's nothing wrong, as Tristan says DX 7 does indeed install with Win 2K.

The quickest way to do this is to go into win98, format the primary partition - do this under a dos prompt - format c: /s, then copy all the files from your secondary partition (including system files - ensure that show hidden files is activated under your folder options the best way to do this is probably using Xcopy - but I prefere the drag and drop method which while more time consuming is easier for me!). Another way would be to boot uo with a win98 boot disk, format the primary partition with format c: /s (ensures that system files are copied) then perform a reinstallation of Win 98. THis while more time consuming will probably be the most successfull way of uninstalling win2K - and you get a nice fresh install at the same time. If you have formatted to NTFS, you need to boot up with a win98 boot disk, delete the NTFS partition, create a FAT32 partition, format it then install win98. Remember in all cases to copy anything you want from the priomary partition over to the secondary partition first, as everything on the primary partition will be lost. A final alternative would be to purchase a program such as System Commander 2000 which will convert NTFS partitions back to FAT32 and vice versa - not sure if it works with Win 2K NTFS though.

The Matrox G400 marvel is a very good all round card, not only does it have stronger 3D performance than the ATI 128, but the marvel is a very good all in one solution with excellent video capture facilities. It really depends which path you want to take. If you have a digital video camera, the Miro Pinnicle PCI cards produce extremely good results.

I think that you should probably wait for another driver release. I have a K7M, with a Matrox G400, and while I've had a few problems, generally the motherboard has been very stable. Try upgrading to the latest K7m bios (1008 - avalible on Asus' website - http//www.asus.com) I know that there have been many problems with Nvidia Win 2000 drivers.

sorry - mental block, forgot how to spell dual!!!!!!!!

I've got an Athlon 800 and to be honest I think it's the best thing I've ever bought. I've owned a variety of other CPU's - Celeron 500, Pentium III 550 and the Atlon has been the most impressive by a long way. Remeber, if you buy a duel Celeron system, you'll miss out on the new SSE instructions of the new processors - the Athlon has a very comprehensive SSE instruction set - 3DNOW which can make a significant impact on games performance for example. Also remember that not every application and game fully supports duel processors and that there have been many posts reporting serious problems with duel processor setups.

I found that just installing the official drivers over the BETA ones without uninstalling worked fine for me - that's not to say that this is the best way forward however.