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Matrox Millennium G450 Videocard


Date
: 12/17/00 – 11:53:10 PM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

Manufactor: Matrox
Price: $160

Thanks to MPL for supplying us with the G450 videocard!

Introduction

In the past, OC Online has reviewed some very powerful 3D videocards; such as the NVIDIA Geforce 2 GTS, or the ATI Radeon. Today, we bring you a review of another kind of videocard. I tested the Matrox Millennium G450, a highend videocard targeted mostly at businesses and non-gamers. Let’s see what this videocard can do.

Specifications

Like I said, the Millennium G450 is not a card for hardcore gamers, but a videocard for professional users who would use it to work on spreadsheets, do some typing, and watch a DVD from time to time. Games are not entirely out of the picture however, but if you plan on fragging very often in Q3A or UT, this card doesn’t look up to the challenge from the specs. Occassional gamers who enjoy Starcraft, Red Alert 2, etc, won’t be dissapointed with the G450 since it delivers them the best image quality available.

In short, the G450 is the card you want if you are into stuff like graphic design, video-editing and other more professional applications.

Now let’s see what the Millennium G450 specs are:

- 0.18 micron technology

- AGP 1X, 2X, 4X

- 360 MHz RAMDAC

- 32 MB DDR memory

- Support for OpenGL and DirectX

- 256-bit DualBus

- DualHead Display

- Vibrant Color Quality rendering

- Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping

- UltraSharp DAC

- Integrated TV encoder

- High-quality DVD playback

As you can see Matrox included the latest technology into their Millennium G450 videocard. There are some things I would like to point out because they are pretty important. Matrox has built the G450 chip with the latest 0.18 micron technology, which lowers the temperature of the chip, creating a higher yield. High yields means faster, cooler running chips. Great for overclocking…theoretically.

The G450 comes with a healthy 360MHz RAMDAC, which enables the videocard to deliver excellent output, and support high resolutions without giving up quality. Since Matrox is aiming at the professional user who watches his/her monitor all day long, they need their chip to have redeeming ability in its 2D display. Compared to the G400, the G450 also carries a second RAMDAC running at 230MHz to control another monitor when you use the DualHead features this card has. Thanks to these two RAMDACs, you can enjoy a resolution of 2056x1536x32bit
on the pimary monitor and a resolution of 1600x1200x32bit on the secondary monitor. Impressive eh? Now start saving for those two Iiyama 22′ monitors and you’re all set!

Even if you are not into FPS games, you still need a good amount of memory on your videocard. The Millennium G450 comes with 32MB DDR memory (some bulk versions come with 32MB SDR memory, so make sure you check out what memory you are paying for!). Thanks to these 32MB you can use the G450 along with a nice 22′ monitor and enjoy very high resolutions with a 32-bit color depth. Again, this is a must if you are into Photoshop or video-editing, because you can’t work efficiently if you use a 640×480 resolution.

The coolest feature that Matrox implemented is DualHead. This technology lets you use two monitors at the same time or a monitor and a TV. You can do very coolstuff with it, but I will come back to these later in the review.

DualHead Multi Display

This is one of the best, and probably most used features of the DualHead. Thanks to DualHead Multi Display you can extend your desktop over two monitors giving you a much bigger work area. Can you imagine working on a spreadsheet on two 22′ monitors? Finally that annoying side scrolling is in the past! I also think that it might be interesting to have a much used application on one monitor (like your email client) and then use the second monitor to do your daily work on. Very efficient indeed.

DualHead Zoom

The next feature of the Matrox DualHead technology is the DualHead Zoom function. This trick will be used mostly by the graphic designers between us, the computer artists. It lets you zoom in on an area on the primary monitor and then shows the zoomed part on the secondary monitor. That way you can adjust the zoomed area and immediately see the result on the entire image.

DualHead DVDMax

Movie fans will love this function. You run a DVD movie on the computer screen and the DualHead shows a full screen copy of it on the secondary output, which can be linked to another monitor or even to a bigscreen TV! Very cool for the movielovers and home cinema guys.

DualHead TV Output

People who have to give presentations will adore this feature since it lets them show a copy what they see on the monitor onto a TV. The G450 supports independent refresh rates to keep the primary output (your monitor) flicker free.

DualHead Clone

Thanks to this feature you can clone the output of the first monitor onto the secondary monitor. You always wanted to play your favorite game on big screen TV? Here’s your chance :).

As you can see Matrox has really worked hard on their DualHead feature, and they’ve put a lot of effort into it. Thanks to all their hard work, they have
become an example for all other videocard companies following the dualhead path of enlightenment. nVidia has included this kind of technology into their low budget videocard, the Geforce 2 MX. They call it ‘TwinView’, but it is not as mature and well featured as Matrox’s DualHead. Of course we must remember that Matrox has been doing it for a longer time. And since nVidia is evolving
so quickly, the question is: Will Matrox stay on top? Only time will tell…

Testing

Test System:

- Asus CUSL2 Motherboard

- Intel 1GHz processor

- 256MB PC133 RAM

- Western Digital 20GB 7200rpm UDMA100 IDE hard drive

I let the G450 run several benchmarks like 3D Mark 2000 and Quake3: Arena. You know, the usual stuff. But you should not make your decision on buying the G450 based on these tests since the G450 is NOT a gamers card and these benchmarks are all 3D orientated. I just included them to show you what to expect if you want to play 3D games with it.

Quake 3: Arena – Demo 001 – Version 1.17

Like the benchmark shows, the G450 isn’t the best gaming card available. If you are satisfied with 800x600x16 and 1024x768x16 then the Matrox card will do just fine. On the other hand, since 19′ monitors aren’t all that expensive anymore, we all like to play at 1280x1024x32 and that is something not possible with the G450.

3D Mark 2000 v1.1

Just like the Q3 benchmarks, the G450 can maintain a decent framerate
at 800x600x16, but once you take it one step higher, the card falls short.

As I predicted, the Millennium G450 is not a winner in these benchmarks. What I can say is that the benchmarks never looked so good as they did with the G450! The image quality is excellent and the color scheme is good as well. Matrox definitely succeeded in their goal to deliver a videocard with great visual quality.

I watched some DVD movies with the G450 and the card was just great! Perfect image quality and no artifacts what so ever.

Overclocking

The G450 did not overclock very well. Only a few extra MHz were gotten, and since it didn’t make any difference in the scores, I decided not to show the results. The software that is run on the G45O does not gain much by overclocking either.

Bundled Software

Most companies included some games or demos into their retail packages. Matrox is no different, but instead of including games, they included more professional and business software in the box. This is a good idea since people who use this kind of software are the same people that Matrox targets to buy the G450 videocard.

Simply 3D

With just a few button clicks, Micrografx Simply 3D 3 allows you to create totally customizable professional quality 3D stills and animations. Simply 3D 3 outputs transparent animated GIFs and hot-linked VRML 2 animations for the Internet, AVIs, and most bitmap formats for presentation and print media, and sequential images for video.

Picture Publisher

Micrografx Picture Publisher 8 makes creating mind-blowing Web graphics fast and easy with exclusive cutting-edge features and comprehensive functionality for professional image editing. Version 8 includes the addition of substantial new Web functionality that helps address the complexities of Internet graphics, including Web styles templates, an integrated animated GIF editor, progressively rendered JPEGs, advanced palette control features, and the Web Output Wizard.

Matrox DVD Player

This high quality, easy-to-use software DVD player supports standard and advanced navigational features, including aspect ratio scaling, full-screen output to TV, and slow motion playback. Besides offering full-frame, full-resolution video playback in single monitor mode, the Matrox DVD Player has been optimized for Matrox’s unique DualHead Display. This allows you to take advantage of DualHead DVDMax mode and watch a DVD title full-screen on TV while using your computer monitor to compose email messages or write reports, for example.

Thanks to Hot Hardware for this pic!

Good work Matrox! They included several nice programs that make the G450 shine. These programs will be appreciated a lot by the business people who buy this card, but I must admit that I enjoyed playing with them too.

Conclusion

The G450 is definitely a winner and a good videocard for people who are not into 3D gaming. The image quality is excellent and only Matrox videocards can deliver such fine quality. The bundled software is very complete, and of course the DualHead features give the card a boost.