Nice review from HotHardware

[Michel]

HotHardware has it's review up.

this is one of the better reviews of the Parhelia i've seen.

Read it all here




Piece of conclusion:

Alright, deep breath... This one gets fairly complicated. The Matrox Parhelia 128MB card, in our opinion at this point in time, is your basic conundrum. We were enamored by the beauty of the images it rendered on our displays in both 2D and 3D mode, with 16X FAA and a sharp, clean desktop image. However, this card needs two things desperately, if Matrox plans to compete head to head with the likes of ATi's R300 or the NV30, significant driver optimizations and a die shrink. Add a few extra features to the Parhelia's Power Desk Software, crank the core and memory clocks up to 300MHz and 700MHz respectively and you have formidable competition against NVIDIA's and ATi's next generation hardware. Finally price is another obstacle for the Parhelia. At $399 suggested retail, it will be hard to justify versus the likes of a GeForce4 Ti 4200. Here's hoping discounting is also on the Parhelia's horizon.

[bobby2]

Strange review - 'High End Gaming Card'!

But the odd thing was not great numbers, but the actual amazing Matrox vs Nvidia home bench scores - Matrox whupped ass in its own test, and the 4600 scraped it in the Nv test.

Bodes well for future games, and HotHardware is right with driver/ arch improvements - maybe a high end Gaming card after all

What I would like to see is a 'id' opinion of how well the architecture will cope with Doom3

[mstoppa]

I completely agree. Interesting review, and the conclusions they draw are similar to mine. Driver maturity / die shrinkage would definately be a positive step.

[Fenrir(AVA)]

A revision in the card would be my choice, think I might hold out for that. Hopefully sometime towards end of this year or early next year say Jan-Feb. Beef up the speed of the card could help the performance tremendously