Your Favorite chips

[TheBigLebowski]

What do YOU guys have installed in your systems, wich do you find to be more reliable and overall the best in your eyes?

It's soo god damn tough to figure out what chip in your machine, I'm frustrated
and am trying to get an idea of what everyone prefers.

I was thinking Matrix Infinity but the new Crystal chip came out....
I'm just not sure what the hell to choose??!?!


I just want to be able to play DVDs and backups of my games to keep the original disks from getting scratched and ****ed up.

Crazy thread I know, so what do you guys run in your personal systems?
Anyone care to explain the positive and negatives of the 4 main chips AKA Ice, Matrix, DMS, Ice Team release, or is there somekind of webpage listing this already? (other then the 4 main sites)
Thanks guys

[muppet]

Well, I think personally there's two "real" choices!

A MI or a Crystal.

I have a MI, I wasn't able to easily get a Crystal here in NZ.

Don't bother looking at the clones, they're cheap and nasty and have many varied issues (though it seems some do work OK)

At the end of the day, they all do exactly the same thing. Allow you to play backups, homebrew and remove all the stupid limitations (and protections).
Apart from that, it comes down to really small little features. I was thinking of getting a Crystal Chip v2.0, but I can see nothing at all it offers that MI doesn't offer apart from DNS Auth Bypassing.

At the moment Crystal Chips seem to be releasing updates on a regular basis (unlike the others) and responding well to user requests and bugfixes. So my recommendation is get a CC. But they're all pretty much the same

[gelato]

If you're just looking to play just your DVD backups as you said in your post. Then you're probably better off with a bargain modchip. Well not really bargain, just a mod-chip with the core features not all the "flashy" stuff. By flashy stuff, I mean running applications on your PS2 like SMS media player which let's you watch files of different format on your TV or using a hard drive to backup and load your games from.

If you just want the core features: look for a modchip which will play both PS1 and PS2 games, and has a region free feature meaning you can play both PAL and NTSC formats. Look into a DUO3 or Ghost2. But if you look at the price difference between modchips the high end stuff is only separated by like $15 from the cheap stuff. So you might as well get a MI or CC. As the previous poster stated they're pretty much the same to a user with your needs. Personally, I like the CC.

[Breath of Fire]

I have had no problems with my Crystal Chip 1.2 it works flawlessly and has a nice support and updates.

[eug900]

I know someone will yell at me for this, but i like the dms4 pro, not lite. I do admit that the Lite sucks balls.lol

[EspeN]

ive installed 100+ Matrix no problems.
Took in 5 cc 1.1 chips, didnt like them at all.
Continued with Matrix.

[jetcat]

Installed 250+ Crystal and not a problem.And the new 2.0 seems to mark the way for modchips.Installed a few of 2.0 and I´m impressed

[mjh74]

For me, nothing has beaten the Matrix Infinity, I've only ever had 1 PS2 die after chipping and that was with a Crystal 1.1 so I only really use MI's. H2O's have been ok in the earlier machines but for solid booting everytime, MI.

[Jones23]

The CC can't kill a PS2, that's a fact!
The only thing that can kill it is a bad installation, so that was definitely your fault, maybe you forgot a laserfix or you had some solder bridges.
Don't tell the CC killed the PS2, that's a lie!

[hawkbug]

Yeah, I would say that I've never seen a modchip directly kill a PS2. What has killed the PS2s I've run across is bad media and scratched discs, and even then the lasers can be replaced. Bad soldering has been the culprit in a few I've seen as well. Too much heat applied to traces and chips during installs will also kill them - if not right away, slowly over time you'll see issues.

I think as long as you stay away from clones and go with either a Matrix Infinity or Crystal Chip, you'll be very happy. The Matrix gives you more control over some stuff without using a Boot Manager, while the CC uses a Boot Manager for a majority of it's features - but it has a ton more features and abilities. So, it all depends on what you're going to do with it I guess.