Matrox To Announce New Card Next Week?

[Haig]

I guess Matrox is running out of niches..

Too early to tell about this market. 1 thing we've never bragged about with respect to our mms boards is how it is designed specifically for long distance cabling without any visual degradation. Believe it or not, most traders and other users in this market require thousands of feet of cabling to their crt's and dfp's.

Haig

[cjolley]

Cool!
I could play a DVD on my home computer and watch it at work
Chuck

[Ali]

Hiag, Ive always wondered about that. We had a guy on here a wee while ago complaining about visual degradation with his G400 (G450?) when putting it through a KVM switch. Ive always found that Matrox didnt even notice the KVM, and that SiS and Intel cards loose a lot of clarity (only other cards plugged into my KVM).

Good to know its been engineered that way, not just that I was lucky.

Ali

[GT98]

The thing about Nvidia...I think their tactics of coming out with a refreshed graphics core/Card/etc is going to bite them in the ass to tell you the truth. Theres really no need for a new 3D gamers card every 6 months since its taking almost 2-3 years for a game to take advantage of what say a Geforce 2 can do!

I think maybe Matrox was smart in what they where doing...getting into a market that they could be profitable with older hardware and letting ATI and Nvidia run themselfs into the ground by coming out with newer and newer hardware or something like that, and biding their time to come out with a revolutionary Product that kicks ass both in 2D and 3D? Though I think the G550 was an abortion...something went seriously wrong there....So many posivitive things could have come out of it and we get stuck with halfass product that doesnt even add up to the sum of its parts!

Scott

[DuRaNgO]

I think you'll see the 6 mo. cycle will cause many of their card makers go out of business due to saturation

[Wombat]

We'll see. Nvidia does a nice job of making it very easy for mfrs to make nvidia cards. "Here's the chip, here's the reference design, here's drivers." Companies can just choose which GF cards they want to manufacture.

That said, even my GF3 Ti is not as fast as I'd like in some situations.

[DGhost]

The 6 month product cycle worked well back when the economy was expanding very rapidly, but with the recent changes its gonna be very difficult to keep up with it. I believe there is a reason that NVidia is branching out into different directions.

Of course, i also believe that their branching out is gonna bite them in the arse one of these days...

as good as the NForce boards are rumored to be, manufacturer interest in them is pretty low... among other things...

Also... the MMS boards from Matrox will work quite nicely in *any* os that supports the core and multiple monitors, not requiring any special support to get all 4 of them... I am quite glad that Matrox kept with the 1 core/output design on the MMS instead of going with NVidia's cheaper, half arsed route... didn't know about the distance stuff, but that rules...

[Haig]

We had a guy on here a wee while ago complaining about visual degradation with his G400 (G450?) when putting it through a KVM switch.

We have Belkin's and KVM's all thru out the company and I have 1 at home as well. With standard vga cables, yes, you will see degradation and ghosting probably starting around 1024x768.

Using expensive well shielded vga cables will be good until 1600x1200@60hz.

Note that the long distance cabling thing I was referring to was only towards the mms boards without any switch boxes.

Haig

[WayneHu]

I guess the custom-made cable is necessary for this case?

Like the high qulaity VGA cable from Better Cables company?

http://www.bettercables.com/1met328feetv.html

[xortam]

My buddy uses a long BetterCables VGA cable for his FPTV run. They'll do you up a custom length and connectors on request ... for a price.

[Ali]

About that KVM issue. I use the cables that came with the switch (Bilkin) for all 3 machines plugged into it.

The Matrox (G400 16M SH) is still crystal clear at 1280*1024*85 that I run it at, the Intel (8M something or other) is ok if plugged straight into the monitor (21inch Hitachi, cant remember the model number), while going through the KVM its quite ghosted, but you only realy notice it with black text on white background.

The SiS (8m, cant remember the model number either) is ok again when going directly to the monitor, but is very very bad when going through the KVM.

The SiS is on the phone system logger, so is never realy used anyway, the Intel is on the file server, so is only used to check out errors (very seldom), and the G400 is on the database admin computer (which is also my desktop, cos my company is too cheap to buy me a seperate pc).

I always thought I was just lucky that the Matrox was so good, specially after reading that post a while ago, then when you mentioned about the lenght thingee above, I assumed your hardware guys had taken into account the fact that a lot of bussiness users use KVMs, so therefore engineered their cards to have a strong output under those conditions.

Please dont say I was wrong!

Ali

[Haig]

Nah you're not wrong Eventhough the non mms cards don't have anything special done to them for long distance cabling (thousands of feet), the output circuitry used on them are still of high quality.

Our testing lab is also wiredup with belkin's and kvm's on every system so that we can catch ghosting.

Haig