Parhelia Users?

[jackzod]

Already switched to a 9700...
I had too much banding for my taste, plus the aniso thing was annoying me, i think today's card should at least allow you to chose more than 2x aniso. (plus i don't know why you take such a performance hit by enabling it).

[Kurt]

Radeon 9500 is on its way (too cheap to pass upon, I'm not going to spend 350 EUR for a 9700 -not worth it IMO).

Parhelia when they finally price-drop it. I'd buy it now if I had a definite answer on how not to get the banding effect with TripleHead (no way I'll be using CRTs, even with BNC). OTOH I might get a G550 for working in DualHead Real Soon Now.

[K6-III]

I've got the Parhelia and shall be keeping it for some time to come.....just hope the driver support stays around.....

Those damn PrecisionCAD drivers are the reason I went this route in the first place....

[Gospel]

I am staying with the Parhelia. I am a heavy user of Matrox's PixelTOUCH feature. With the Parhelia, I can now for the first time use PixelTOUCH on *both* monitors and independently at that. I enjoy an occossional game like RealMYST, Sonic Game Pack, and Atari games remade in 3D. I will be buying the game Syberia in a week or two.

[DGhost]

Seeing that NVidia is producing FreeBSD drivers and the fact that their drivers have been a bit stabler than ATI's for longer, I would probably go with one of those.

A good quality board manufacturer will still allow pretty good picture quality. Maybe not Matrox sharp, but definately tolerable.

Plus, I am still gonna bet that they have improved the image quality for the GeForceFX cards... but... thats a guess...

[Wombat]

I'd buy it now if I had a definite answer on how not to get the banding effect with TripleHead

That's impossible. Triplehead needs analog screens. Hello banding.

[WyWyWyWy]

Staying with Parhelia until Matrox's next card!!!
If there is no such thing as "next card" I'll probably go for something like AIW instead of vanilla 9700... but I'll wait 2 years at least.

Just love all the Parhelia features!

By the way, I don't think banding varies from card to card. Rather, it is more like from CRT to CRT. My 17" has no banding at all while my 15" has banding only with PowerDVD diagnostics.

[mungu]

I plan on keeping my parhelia. I have had it since the middle of summer and I am totally satisfied with it. Personally, I have never encoutered any banding, I am running a 17" Sony LCD, but it is hooked up through analog, not DVI (This LCD does not have a DVI connection).
I use this computer mostly for work, a lot of photoshop work. Every once in a while I will use it for gaming, and it has performed well enough that I have not even considered any other card.

[K6-III]

LCD for photoshop.....ICKK!!!

[Wombat]

By the way, I don't think banding varies from card to card. Rather, it is more like from CRT to CRT. My 17" has no banding at all while my 15" has banding only with PowerDVD diagnostics.

Well, you can think that, but if you check the archives here, you'll see people say that they upgraded identical workstations to Parhelia, and some cards had banding while others didn't.

[Sinistral]

- Im sticking with my Parhelia. Even when working in Maya, or (mostly now) Softimage, the banding is not apparent. Same thing for gaming. The banding only shows up when i try to seek it out through the conventional means everyone else has when the issue was first brought up. Im very happy with the card and enjoying 2x1600x1200 Res most of the time. And when im compositing or have to multitask more i can settle with 3x1280x1024. Though i wish Tri-Head would support 1600x1200 on all monitors. I have 3 19" Samsung 900NF's 85Hz at 1600x1200 res and 100Hz at 1280x1024. I have V-Sync Enabled. And well, yeah. -

Edit: And when/if the P2 does come out, im sure to be eyeing that as well.

[gordo-uk]

Cant see me dumping it for a while, its pretty much trouble free for me.

Providing Matrox keep updating/improving the drivers and I can continue to run games smoothly, doubt I will change before 04, late 03 at the earliest.

[Wombat]

Yeah, well, we'll see about that. Matrox is running out of people to write drivers.

[albatorsk]

I have a Parhelia and I have no ambition to switch cards just yet. It performs reasonably well in Linux (Yes!! Finally someone mentions Linux in this thread!), although it lacks support for Xvideo and hardware accelerated 3D. Hopefully, Matrox will implement those features sooner rather than later.

My card unfortunately suffers from banding too, but it is hardly noticeable. I can only see it when using very bright colours on large areas of the desktop.

I've also made a substantial investment in 3 monitors , and going back to singlehead or dualhead after working with triplehead is just not an option.

[Gohan]

I would never change my P to a R9700 beacuse i would miss the good drivers.

The P is a really good Card, till Pitou the P will stay in my System.