video card needed - which one?

[Hulk]

2x256MB is marginally faster than 1x512MB PC3200, regardless of HT. Check anandtech.com for an in depth review on this.

Mark

[K6-III]

The poor 2D image quality on almost every NVidia card would keep me away.

The better 2D, multimonitor support makes the P750 worth it for your use, especially if you have video editing in mind.

The multimonitor support in MS Pro, for example, was pretty much written around Matrox's implementation...

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by K6-III
The poor 2D image quality on almost every NVidia card would keep me away.

The better 2D, multimonitor support makes the P750 worth it for your use, especially if you have video editing in mind.

The multimonitor support in MS Pro, for example, was pretty much written around Matrox's implementation...

Exactly correct.

Dr. Mordrid

[Ray Austin]

anyway you gize can prove that? I'd really like to believe you, but I have the G-force card and compared to what I was using before... [Matrox g400] I don't see any real difference between the two. "other than the G-force is faster"

I might be blind I don't know?

[JonH]

I appreciate all of the comments. I was ready to put some orders in at Monarch and New Egg and get everything for my new system.
I thought I had the memory and MB stuff figured out, but then I ran into dual channel DDR and MBs supporting dual channel. THe Gigabyte MB was over $100 more than I thought with the dual channel suuport at Monarch.
I'm just lost on this issue at the moment. Any help on which MB and RAM to use with a P4 2.8 HT 800FSB would be very much appreciated.
Jon

[Sasq]

Ray, it's 4am, I'm not going to find links for you, the low 2d quality of nV cards is well documented here and at other sites.

Try using the forum search function and look for an article on image quality. There was a good series of tests done a while ago that not only had subjective tests but also rather technical ones looking at the output of various cards using a cro.

[Dr Mordrid]

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/matrox_parhelia/index.shtml

Note that this was written by/for an nVidia site....and even they say Parhelia (and by extension the P cards) have the best 2D quality. That they also have beautiful TV-out's is sauce for the video editors goose.

Dr. Mordrid

[az]

One important thing that might have been overlooked: Is it important to have hardware overlay on both monitors? I think only the Parhelia and P-Series cards can do that at the moment.

AZ

[Ray Austin]

Thanks Doc for the post.

Although I wish it had a pic for side by side comparison. I don't doubt Matrox quality at all. I've owned several Matrox products over the years. With AGP going away very soon [PCI Express] I would regret spending serious dollars on an AGP based card. [That is opinion, just so we're clear. ]

The picture they show tho really doesn't tell the whole story.



NOTE: The image displayed is in Jpeg format... is that fair??? This is what I mean about an unbiased test.

From the article
I'd like to point out one thing with regards to 2D image quality. NVIDIA does not manufacture its own graphics cards so it's unfair to say that all NVIDIA based graphics card will produce the same quality. For example, the GeForce4 Ti 4200 I used may not be representative of all GeForce4 offerings. At the same time, this becomes a critical issue because you have to know which manufacturers to avoid. With the Parhelia, you know that you're going to get the same quality every time.

you can take any picture and magnify it and find fault with it. Just like you can recompress video 20times with the Canopus codec and find fault with the Matrox codec. [I own the RT2000 & RTX100 boards and am pleased with both.]

So there are all kinds of tricks to make something appear better than what they really are. Each card has it's stengths, the G-force4 card set was a leader for 3D performance when they debuted... the card recieved many good reviews. I knew before I bought the card about the 2D issue. To me it's minor.

To give you an example why I bought what I bought... I have the G400 and the Gforce4 TI 4200.

Ok I am an avid game player. I have an older game called Railroad Tycoon. It's a train type game.

Now I will tell you the Matrox G400 that came with the RT2000 works very well with the game no problem at all... until you play it awhile and have many trains on the tracks. "I played that game many times and still do."

Ok get this... all the times I played it I could only get about 40 trains on the track until the game would start crawling. To be fair the card only has 32MB of ram.

The Nvidia card I can get 80 trains on the tracks and it's still flying. It's now a joy to play that game. To be fair the Nvidia has 64Mb ram.

Alot of this is opinion and what you plan to do with the card so that is my point in this. Read past the hype and buy what you want. Matrox makes good products, but their strengths are different than their competition. But spend mega bucks on AGP and you might regret it, it's life is nearly over at least as far as INTEL is concerned.

ATI, Nvidia, Matrox are all clapping so they can sell more cards.

If Matrox supported all OS's of the past this guy would have a much harder decision.

[Ray Austin]

Originally posted by JonH
I appreciate all of the comments. I was ready to put some orders in at Monarch and New Egg and get everything for my new system.
I thought I had the memory and MB stuff figured out, but then I ran into dual channel DDR and MBs supporting dual channel. THe Gigabyte MB was over $100 more than I thought with the dual channel suuport at Monarch.
I'm just lost on this issue at the moment. Any help on which MB and RAM to use with a P4 2.8 HT 800FSB would be very much appreciated.
Jon

I would choose this one Jon,

Asus P4C800-E motherboard. Using 1 gig Corsair PC3200 twin chips.

[JonH]

Thanks, Ray. Looks reasonably priced and the one review I saw was favorable. Will go with that. Also thinking about having Monarch put the board, RAM and CPU together in a Sonata quiet case (with Altec 380 w) and testing it. Cost is $15 additional. I've never done it myself so this seems wise to me. Have to decide on additional case fans which I don't have a clue about. I don't overclock and the p4 2.8 isn't supposed to get as hot as the faster P4s.
Thanks to everyone with advice thus far.
Jon

[Flying dutchman]

JonH:

I recommend against dual-boot.

Use an emulator like VMWare or VirtualPC to setup a virtual machine that runs windows 98 for your "legacy" statistics application. This way you can use any video adapter you like and not worry about Windows 98 drivers.

Speed in the emulated machine is roughly 50% of your "true" PC speed. Virtual machines are easy to backup, too, since they only consist of one or two simple files...


BTW, there's a nasty issue with most current ASUS boards that have on-board LAN. The MAC address is in the BIOS instead of in the NIC firmware.
So if you use Windows XP's own network drivers instead of the one on the ASUS CD, all boards get the same MAC address. This can create some havoc if you have several of these PC's in a network...

[Flying dutchman]

BTW, I've just switched from a Marvel G200 to an Ati Radeon Excalibur 7000 with 64 mb DDR Ram. It has dual monitor and S-video TV-out support and needs no fan.

2-d quality is extremely good and fast, sharpness is much better than my ole G200. It supports up to 200 Hz and resolutions up to 2048x1536, even with two monitors simultaneously. I'm not a gamer myself so I can't comment on the 3-d speed.

[JonH]

Thanks for the info, Flying Dutchman. I never heard of VMWare or VirtualPC. Will definitely look into it. Also, thanks for the warning on the ASUS LAN drivers. I plan on having at least two PCs networked.
I put my order in with Monarch yesterday. The will build a barebone system for $15 or a complete system for $45. Since I don't have the diagnositic programs or the knowledge about a lot of things, I went with the complete system where I picked all of the components.
It's probably not to late to change my order. Here is what I have. If anyone sees a big problem, please let me know. Only starting with 512 MB of RAM and will add more later if needed. Also plan to add DVD burner after studying up a bit more.

Cases: 100396 - PS 380W - Antec Sonata Piano Black Quiet $102
Case Fan: 100873 - Antec 80mm Case Fan Quiet Fan 2600 RPM $12.99
Motherboards: 110322 - Asus P4C800-E Deluxe 875P/LAN/RAID DDR 40 $197.00
Processor: 120443 - Intel P4 478 2.8 GHz 800 FSB (HT) $213.00
Memory: 140804 - DDR (400) 3200 - 512MB (2 pcs 256) TwinX5 $127.00
Hard Drive: 150614 - Seagate 120 GB Barracuda 7200RPM 8MB Cache $110.00
CD/DVD-ROM: 160808 - Lite-On 16x40x Black DVD $49.00
Floppy Drive: 170110 - Mitsumi 3.5 Black Floppy Drive $19.00
Video Card: 190329 - Matrox Millennium P750 TH/DVI/TV AGP $210.00
Operating System: 210111 - Windows XP Professional $152.00
Warranty: 800012 - 1 Year - Parts & Labor - Plus $15.00

Jon

[Brian Ellis]

Jon

Only one hard drive? Really? IMHO, you would be better to have a smaller one on IDE1 Master for Win and a separate partition for apps, then keep the 120 Gb affair for video on IDE2 Master.