Matrox Millennium G400 Review

G400 Specs

The mystery of the vanishing clock speeds

The G400 that we got was the "vanilla" model. The G400 MAX is following it (for the retail market) in a few weeks. The G400 has 32MB of SGRAM on it. The memory is laid out in an 8 chip x 4MB pattern, with 4 on the front and 4 on the back. The RAM is the SEC 6ns variety. Matrox is very closed-mouth about their clock speeds, though. That's not a problem, though, because with a little investigation and deduction we can figure some things out.

We used a third-party software package, which identified the core clock at 125 MHz. Along with Anand's method of calculating the clock speed via the fillrate (through which he also derived 125MHz), it seems that 125MHz is a pretty solid answer for the core speed of the vanilla Millennium G400. What about the memory speed? Well, we already know that the onboard SGRAM is 6ns. This effectively limits the SGRAM to 166MHz maximum.

Now whether or not Matrox wants to clock their SGRAM at the theoretical "safe" maximum, we don't know. What we DO know about the Millennium G400 is that it performs VERY well at high resolutions and high color depths. From our overclocking experience, the speed of the memory clock is in many ways proportional to such performance, so we're guessing that Matrox is pushing its memory to the maximum rated speed of 6ns - 166MHz.

You'll notice in the pictures below that there is a huge heatsink on the graphics engine. A good precaution, but we found that the chip did not seem to get very hot, although our hardware lab is quite chilly. Taking the temperature with a digital thermometer several hours into benchmarking, we found the temperature to be ~83 degrees Fahrenheit. Not bad at all.