[clintfan]

This notice will hopefully help users like me with the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard are having trouble with their Matrox P750 cards, when viewing BIOS Setup screens, and the Asus color banner. These screens appear as nothing but squashed horizontal colored hash. When you are greeted by this on your first bringup of a new PC, it's scary-- you think you fried something already! But all other outputs --POST, DOS, Windows-- appear fine. And simply updating the mobo and video BIOS doesn't fix it.

Over at the Matrox company forums, there is this thread about this issue with P750 and P650 cards. On top of their latest BIOS they are recommending you try the SystemLogoFix.exe patch which comes with the latest Matrox BIOS download from their support website; see the included readme.txt file for instructions. The readme claims the problem is with VESA VBE, ancient video modes which are only used to product legacy low-level displays such as Setup. Today Matrox has further explained the new cards have an SVGA core, but since some motherboard BIOS's are still looking for a VGA core, certain modes don't display right.

I had to swap in an old PCI video card to get far enough past this to install Windows. Apparently a G550 works fine too. The BIOS update itself installs easily from Windows. I will try the patch this weekend.

-clintfan

 

[clintfan]

I ran the SystemLogoFix.exe patch from Windows (can't be done from DOS), and for my P750 it worked!! It acts like it does another full BIOS update, after which you system has to be restarted. Afterward the P4C800-E Deluxe BIOS Setup screen is now completely usable, once you have hit DELETE after poweron, to bring it up. The title bar appears in rainbow colors, which is funky but fine.

The poweron Asus logo is also now more legible --you can read "Ai Series" and the model number-- but it's still mostly "snow", and nothing like the clear output from my older PCI video card. Windows and DOS output is still completely fine.

You can either live with the snow, or go back into BIOS Setup and change Boot- Boot Settings Configuration- Full Screen Logo to "Disabled", which does switch the initial bootup display to the POST output. IMO displaying POST data instead of a snowy picture, improves the finished appearance of the new PC.

It was nice of Matrox to provide this workaround for an obvious incompatibility.

-clintfan