Received the Parhelia today. Some probs and some good info.

[Snakebitten]

Received the retail Parhelia today. (Preordered from shopmatrox.com and live in the US).

One problem I'm having is in XP with the newest drivers (228?). I cannot set my desktop refresh higher than 60hz in triplehead unless I use the Matrox Powerdesk utility. The reef demo supplies me up to 100hz in single display or 60hz surround. Is this normal? Even if I change my refresh to 85-100 in the matrox powerdesk for triplehead, it still has no effects on games/reef demo. They are still 60hz. I am using 3 Hitachi 19" crt displays.

I remember my Geforce4 being limited to 60hz in games and would score ~8500-9000 in 3dmark 2001SE until I used the refresh fix. (Set it to 85) My scores than shot to around 11000. Any idea if the Parhelia is limited just the same? It is only using 60hz when doing 3dmark just like my GF4 used to, could some sort of similar fix boost fps?

Right now I get around ~5600 in 3dmark 2001SE with everything on. 16x FAA and 1gig color. Looks very sweet.

I get around ~8500 with those features disabled. Still looks good.

[DC]

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34320

DC

[Edward]

Whats your system, I got only 7200 with a P4 2,4 533 fsb.

[Snakebitten]

Edward - I have a P4 ~2556 (Its overclocked). I'm using 150mhz fsb (600mhz compared to the 533) and my memory is clocked at 200mhz rather than 133mhz. My ram is DDR btw.

Probably enough tweaking on my part to give me that extra 1k difference. Otherwise, not sure why our scores vary by that much.

[DGhost]

overclocking the fsb/memory has been shown to give rather large score increases in pretty much all versions of 3dmark.

on a 1.33 tbird using an IWill KK266-R board, i was able to go from my default scores of about 7k w/ a Radeon 8500 to about 8k just by increasing the FSB from 133 to 150mhz and not adjusting the processor multiplier. i would have tried it at 166fsb but 3d was not stable on any card i have

[Edward]

I didn't read good enough, you have the retail and I've the bulk, but I'm aslo at 145 fsb with rimm, man I'm looking forward to an overclockingtool

[Snakebitten]

I probably wont consider overclocking/modding my card for atleast another month. Hope matrox is able to optimize their drivers enough so there really isnt a need to overclock. I'm able to play most triplehead games at 3062x768 w/ 16faa and high graphics. Have only tried NWN and Tribes II so far though.

Warcraft III definately looks better on the P than my old GF4. Smooth at 1024x768 @ 32bit with 16faa and max everything. 1280x1024 for some reason in WC3 with max everything, the mouse curser seems shakey but the gameplay is smooth.

[Snake-Eyes]

Originally posted by Snakebitten
Warcraft III definately looks better on the P than my old GF4. Smooth at 1024x768 @ 32bit with 16faa and max everything. 1280x1024 for some reason in WC3 with max everything, the mouse curser seems shakey but the gameplay is smooth.

I don't think that the cursor thing is an issue with Parhelia. I was playing around with my GF4 in various resolutions with 4xs FSAA and noticed the same thing at 1280.