Summary: Matrox's new video card has new and improved OS/2 drivers. And it's fast.

If you're looking for a blazingly, blindingly, astonishingly fast video card, the Matrox Millenium G400 Max is the card for you. With 32 megs of SDRAM on the card, it can display high resolutions and high color depths simultaneously, and still send bits through fast enough that you won't notice the memory hit. If you want fast, it's fast.

If you're looking for a reliable card, the G400 Max scores well as there. Many of the problems that the older Matrox cards & drivers had - one of the worst was a tendency to lock up Home Page Publisher (and the rest of OS/2) solid when displaying 16 million colors - are gone. My G400 has been performing very, very well and I have no complaints.

If you're looking for a card that's easy to install and painless to configure, it's a mixed bag. I found the install process extremely painful, but that's because of something I didn't expect - and in all honesty Matrox wouldn't have known to factor it in, either. So while my experience was extremely painful and frustrating, I can't say that everyone's will be, and if you read this review before you buy one you'll save yourselves a lot of headaches during the install. Still, there are some extra steps you'll probably have to go through to get it up and running, and it does tarnish Matrox's reputation as the "easy install" graphics card company for OS/2.

There are different models of the G400 available for purchase. The G400 comes in both 16 MB RAM and 32 MB RAM configurations, as well as 300 and 360 MHz RAMDAC models. The G400 Max also has the ability to connect two monitors to the same card, allowing you to set up a dual display without having to buy one video card for each screen. (Note: I don't have two monitors, so I was unable to test this feature under OS/2). All of the G400 cards use a 256 bit graphics chip.

The G400 is a very impressive looking card. It's the first video card I've ever seen to sport both a heat sink and a fan for its processor. The card seems to put out quite a bit of heat, so make sure your computer case can circulate the air inside it well enough to avoid cooking anything important.

If your motherboard supports AGP, you shouldn't have any problems configuring and installing your card. All I had to do was insert the card into the AGP slot, close the case and turn it on. The BIOS assigned the card a free IRQ and that was that.

I did need to upgrade the card's BIOS, however, because at the current level the screen kept flashing artifacts from previous screens and seemed to flicker a whole lot. In previous versions of the Matrox BIOS patches, it was necessary to boot to DOS in order to install anything. Fortunately, Matrox has modified its BIOS install programs and they can now be run in an OS/2 DOS session, which makes the entire ordeal much easier.

Installing the software is still as straightforward as it ever was, with one catch - if you're upgrading from an older Matrox card and driver, make absolutely sure there aren't any older versions of the file PMGAX64.DLL floating around in a directory listed in any of the PATH statements in your config.sys file. If there is, your computer will not deal with the latest drivers very well.

I thought I had removed all traces of the older DLL from my machine, but I forgot that Dialog Enhancer makes a copy of PMGAX64.DLL and places it in the c:\os2\deprog\dll directory (which is usually the first directory in your config.sys' LIBPATH statement). Until I deleted this file I was certain my card was defective, because the drivers simply would not work properly.

If you can avoid that problem, however, the software install should not be a problem. Matrox has always been one of the few companies that puts some effort into their install programs, and it's certainly one of the most automated driver installs I've seen.

As for performance, I'm told that for 3d gaming, the G400 is ok but nothing really special. For a 2d card, however, it screams. 32 MB RAM is more than enough to support 1600x1200x16 million colors and still maintain an active, responsive system. If you do high-color work on high resolution displays, you'll probably want to get this card.

On the 3d side of things, I don't have much experience with 3d games and pictures. I've read in other reviews that the 3d capabilities of the G400 don't match other cards like the 3dfx Voodoo 3000 or the ATI 128 cards. However, I switched over to my Windows partition and played with a few 3d games and it seems to work plenty fast for my tastes. That's not a terribly scientific evaluation, I realize that. Probably the only people who will notice any weaknesses in the 3d capabilities of the G400 will be hard core 3d gaming fanatics. From an OS/2 user's perspective, however, the point is moot - there aren't really that many 3d games out there for OS/2 anyway...

The G400's latest drivers also fix a few bugs that have plagued older Matrox cards. For example, one of the things my old Matrox Millenium II card could NOT do was use the "display background" command in HomePage Publisher. All this command ever did was to let you see any wallpaper that had been set on a web page you were working on while you were working on it, but the Millenium II would never display it properly. The G400 doesn't have this problem, nor does it have a nastier problem that the Millenium II had: locking up in HomePage Publisher when the monitor was displaying a 1280x1024 resolution or higher at 16 million colors.

Overall the G400 is a great product. Installing it and upgrading it is theoretically smooth but it can flake out if you're upgrading from a previous Matrox driver/card, and in those situations it can be quite a headache. People with Matrox cards should consider upgrading anyway, however, because the G400 drivers seem to have fixed some of the bugs associated with the older drivers.

I'd recommend this card to just about anyone interested in a high-performance 2d card with reasonably good 3d capability.

Matrox Millenium DH G400 MAX 32 MB RAM, Matrox Inc.. $249.00 (US Dollars)
Matrox Millenium DH G400 32 MB RAM: $199.00 (US Dollars)
Matrox Millenium DH G400 16 MB RAM: $149.00 (US Dollars)