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Matrox Parhelia-512 128 MB
Jaison Lewis, Mar 28, 2003 0000 hrs ISTGraphic professionals rejoice... now you can play games on your Matrox Graphics cards.
Excellent Quality graphics, Feature Heavy, Can do gaming too
Very Expensive, Slow GPU Core Speed
Expert Rating :
There is no doubt that Matrox is the best graphic card for professionals, but it has always lacked the ability to play 3D games adequately. But not any more the Parhelia not only produces brilliant 2D graphics, but it can play games too... and if that wasn't enough it can span your gaming and work through three monitors.
Matrox Parhelia is aimed at graphic, video editing and other professionals who need the functionality of several monitors. There are several reasons why Parhelia was launched, one of the biggest being the requirement for a faster, better and more innovative card than the Matrox G550, which was frankly not that impressive.
Here are some of the specs of the Matrox Parhelia 128 MB.
512-bit Chip
80 Million Transistors
0.15 Micron
220 MHz Core clock speed
4 Pixel Pipes
4 Texture units per pipe
275 MHz DDR RAM
256-bit memory bus
17.6 GBps Memory bandwidth
AGP 4X
On viewing the specs the only thing that hurts is the core speed of the GPU, which is really low, even lower than the Radeon 8500. Where this card lacks in power it makes up in very impressive features.
Features
This card has more features than any other card in the market. I will list a few of the important features here.
TripleHead Desktop
There is something about having 3 displays that makes life so much easier. If you have ever used a dual display setup, imagine the functionality to improve a couple of times over. This kind of setup would ideally be useful for video editing, Web designing, print graphic designing, stock analysis. Having three displays also lets you have fun that Matrox calls Surround Gaming.
Surround Gaming
This is my favourite feature of this card and I must say I had a lot of fun. Running a game on three monitors is beyond extreme imagination. Initially it did take time to get adjusted, but once it was done there was nothing like it.
There is quite a bit of manual work that goes into setting up surround gaming and it works with only a few select games. You need to install and set a profile in order to run them, which can be downloaded from the Matrox site. New games are added every couple of weeks the latest being IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles.
Here are screenshots of two of the games we tried Quake III Arena Demo and Return to Castle Wolfenstein and one image is from the Matrox site using Microsoft's Age Of Mythology.
16X Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering
Yes! This card supports 16X AA, but after numerous tries it didn't manage to successfully run anything at 16X AA. So we ran our AA tests at 4X AA. This is after we installed the latest drivers from Matrox. The driver of this card also doesn't let you set the amount of Anisotropic filtering.
10-bit GigaColor technology
This is why Matrox is the best; this card can simultaneously display 1 billion colours at a time. This feature is available for all modes of display including the TV out and it is available for 2D and 3D applications, DVD and Video. Though this mode doesn't work while using the TripleHead or DualHead modes, as well as during Surround gaming.
Test Bench Rig
We tested the card on our AMD rig with the following competition.
CPU: AMD Athalon 2600+
Motherboard: Epox KT333 EP-8K3A+
Memory: 512 TwinMOS DDR RAM
Hard Drive: 120 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM HDD
Optical Drive: Toshiba 16X DVD-ROM drive
Case: ADCOM Lg. ATX Tower, Screwless design/w 300W Power Supply
Benchmarks
It's time to test the gaming performance of the Parhelia 128 MB.
Performance
The Matrox performs decently and is equal to a Radeon 8500, whose performance can be seen in the Mega Graphics Accelerator Shootout and can be used as a "timepass" gaming card and more of a graphic professional card. But of course the surround gaming feature is really something I would like to see in more conventional gaming graphic cards.
Conclusion
Our tests are mainly made for gaming cards and it doesn't do justice to the features of this card if I rate its performance only on the basis of these tests. But the fact remains, even though this card is mainly a graphics card for professionals it possesses the ability to perform decently in games and offer something like surround gaming that no other card can do. There are also no doubts about its performance in graphic applications. So this card is certainly recommended if you can afford it, thought hardcore gamers will definitely want something with much more punch to it. The Matrox Parhelia is priced at Rs.30,000/- and comes with a one-year warranty.
Test Unit Sourced From: Neoteric Informatique Pvt Ltd., Mumbai
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