dc7600 - Accelerated video

My €99 second hand (well, €50+€49 shipping) Matrox G550 arrived last week finally. The original purchase receipt in the box was from 2008 - who was buying those in 2008, other than BeOS users? And it was from Germany, where there were a lot of those around; so I wouldn't be madly surprised to know that its already lived a life without its 3D kit ever being used.

It works, and well - as I'd expect with a Rudolf Cornelissen driver. Haven't dug up a second VGA monitor to try dual-heading, but I imagine that'll work too.

BeRometer now has close to, or top level results in every category - from just about in terms of graphics performance (the RIVA TNT2 that had R5 drivers is probably just as fast or faster, for instance) to absolutely ridiculous (disk speed, pure compute speed) where it's often 5x the fastest recorded. We're comparing to 1999s top end hardware here, so mid-range late 2005 should be expected to be about that much faster; and of course an SSD and a different IDE driver to what everyone in 1999 had are helping.

These days you wouldn't expect a 6 year old computer to be *that* much slower; but as I've mentioned before, things get obsolete slower now than the late 90s.

I've just ordered a Noctua fan to replace the case fan, and I do hope its the rattling one and not the CPU cooler - of course, neither were rattling by the time I opened the case to check what wire type the fan used.

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