Parhelia Users?

[gt40]

Sticking with my P.
I have absolutely no performance issues in any games.
I am currently using it in dual head and it works great for video editiing and CAD.
Yes the banding is there, but only seems prominent at high monitor brightness levels.

[alewisa]

Well, I have two Parhelias, but am going to have to get an ATI for gaming.

Warning - long post follows!

The problem? Matrox, as ever, is still superb for picture quality. Hell, I still use a Millenium card for troubleshooting, and the picture quality is still just about better than any other non-matrox card, even now).

I have lots of machines, and I generally upgrade one then shift components downstream. I used to enjoy being cutting edge, but at 36 have other responsibillities now.

Anyroad, decided it was time to upgrade the gaming rig. It's only a 1.2ghz Athlon, but its been running at 800MHz the last couple of years (nothing stressed it, and I knew I could o/c to 1.4, so had 600Mhz of oomph in reserve). The mobo is an Abit KT7-RAID, with an SB Audigy. Was running a G-Force 2 GTS for gfx. The 3D speed was adequate, but the picture quality left something to be desired (as I said, the Millenium produces better quality. It's all down to the RAMDACs).

So, I buy a Parhelia. Actually, I buy 2, as one of my work rigs needs overhauling.

Great. Parhelia doesn't work in the KT7 board. Nothing. Works fine in a Gigybyte board with a Duron (but that rig has gone to my son now). The mobo works. The card works. But not together.

The second card is in my primary office rig, a PIII-733, where it replaced a G400Max. Games run a bit faster (its 'my' game machine for the odd LAN party at my place), picture qulaity 'might' have improved a bit. But overall, its a good upgrade. Ok, the card imbalances the machine, but hey!

So I have a Parhelia doing nothing. My main workstation has just been upgraded from dual PIII-500 to PIII-933 (humbug, should have checked the board specs, it only has 100Mhz FSB, so the CPU's are only running at 700Mhz! Anyone know how to defeat clock lock on a PIII??? Or persuade a Gigabyte 6BXD board to do 133MHz?!) I'll replace the G400Max in there with the Parhelia, I guess, but I still feel disappointed.

So an ATI 9500Pro seems to be the way to go. I can't justify a 9700Pro price increase over the 9500Pro, for the performance. And according to reviews, the 9500Pro is faster in most cases than a 4600Ti, and of course cheaper. And ATI have always been good at video (even the Mach64 was reasonable for its time). So, its "cheap", its fast, and it will match the machine. I guess I'll probably go the whole hog and replace the motherboard and CPU in the games rig, but that still doesn't quite solve the problem... what do I do with the Abit board and Athlon... I hate throwing anything anyway! My servers still use PPro CPU's, I still have a K2-400 cpu (no mobo yet, I'm sure my firewall needs upgrading soon though...!)

Whilst I'm not unduly bothered about an imblance between mobo/cpu power and gfx power, as it allows me to stagger upgrades across the year rather than replace everything at once, it does bother me a bit on my work machines. No real reason, I don't ray trace or owt. I'm not a die hard gamer (I use a TRS-80, C-64 and Amigas for games... much better game play!). I guess it's coz an office PC has a longer lifetime - I dont see Word2000 needing a more powerful machine, nor IE, nor anyother office app. So the PC's dont need upgrading quite so often! As a consequence, I like them to be reasonably balanced. Also, I tend to stick to Intel for office stuff. Yeah, AMD imho is better for games, but (again, my mho) less stable. My data - and access to my data - is crucial. Just not ready to entrust that to AMD machines. On a game rig I don't care if there's an issue (boot problem, or OS/data problem) - I just rebuild the hardware, or reghost the drive, and voila OS installed and patched, games installed and patched. At most, I might lose some saved games. But nothing important.

Neither do I want to desert Matrox. I trust the brand. I trust (and like) Abit boards. For stabillity I go for Supermicro (servers), Gigabyte (workstations), and Abit for fun (speed, o/c, and stable). For gfx its Matrox. The only reason I went GTS a couple of years ago was the the G400Max just couldnt cut some games (UT, Alice) anymore, not for guests anyroad. They found the screen jerky, or too much response lag.

Hell, other than the 8-bit stuff that I still use, until last year my main workstation was a dual PII-300, Gigabyte LX board and a G200 16mb with DVD add-on - fine for working on, and when I moved on I retained it for watching DVD. Picture quality was superb, DVD playback was nice, and when it ran Linux well too. Still have it, cant bear to part with it just yet. Might become a server soon, as the CPU's run cooler than the Pentium Pro's. Hmm, then I need to turn the central heating back on I guess!

I suppose its because Matrox has never really targetted the games market. Lets face it, back in '96 the bees knees card was a Matrox Millenium. For games, add a Voodoo 3dfx. if you were sensible, you used a dual input monitor rather than a pass-thru on the 3dfx, to retain image quality. Why? The Millenium was not a games card. Roll on the G100 and G200... still not games cards. Neither was the G400, especially when the G-Force came out. Matrox don't target this market. Their problem now is that ATI and Nvidia are targetting the workstation market.

The upshot is, I'm keeping the Parhelias, unless someone wants to buy one from me, or swap of a 9500Pro ;-) but an ATI card will soon be in a games rig. I just can't ignore the price-performance ratio of the 9500Pro. And as it does offer hardware DVD/MPEG acceleration, it does what I need. Games, and the odd playback of films from DVD. And if the picture quality is better than a NVidia card, bonus.

[[GDI]Raptor]

Talked with a friend of mine in one for Norways bigest hardware web-shops, and he told me that they sell alot of Parhelia's, noe to many Retail boards, but they have sold alot of OEM boards, and they are currently sold out.....

[Kurt]

How many Nvidia or ATi for each P?

[Kurt]

Originally posted by alewisa

<snip>
Great. Parhelia doesn't work in the KT7 board. Nothing. Works fine in a Gigybyte board with a Duron (but that rig has gone to my son now). The mobo works. The card works. But not together.
<snip>

==>Abit problem. I used to like them a lot but I've had too many issues with them. I use Asus when Gigabyte or MSI don't cut it OC-wise (they're pretty good at regular speeds too).

So I have a Parhelia doing nothing. My main workstation has just been upgraded from dual PIII-500 to PIII-933 (humbug, should have checked the board specs, it only has 100Mhz FSB, so the CPU's are only running at 700Mhz! Anyone know how to defeat clock lock on a PIII??? Or persuade a Gigabyte 6BXD board to do 133MHz?!) I'll replace the G400Max in there with the Parhelia, I guess, but I still feel disappointed.

==> if you're lucky you can try and locate some PIII 1GHz at FSB100. Other than that you'll have to either go the VIA route or upgrade to Athlon MP or P4 Xeon (not worth the money Intel is charging for it).

So an ATI 9500Pro seems to be the way to go. I can't justify a 9700Pro price increase over the 9500Pro, for the performance. And according to reviews, the 9500Pro is faster in most cases than a 4600Ti, and of course cheaper. And ATI have always been good at video (even the Mach64 was reasonable for its time). So, its "cheap", its fast, and it will match the machine. <snip>

==> 100% with you on that one

<snip>

The upshot is, I'm keeping the Parhelias, unless someone wants to buy one from me, or swap of a 9500Pro ;-)
==> I might be interested

[piaxVirus]

The banding in my first monitor is annoying. The banding in my second monitor is extremely bad. It reminds me of the flickering red parts in that old Captian Power tv show. My third moitor has no banding at all.

The present amount of banding is unacceptable for me. After christmas I will be RMAing the card, and continue re-RMAing it until I get a card with much less banding or I get a refund.

[GT98]

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

Only problem is at the rate Matrox is going their isnt going to be anyone around to write them

I sold my two 19in montiors to pay for my R9700 and I still have my 21in Monitor as my primary. The "Added advantage" of Surrond gaming was totally negated by somewhat poor performance that P did in those games. I went from a R8500 to the Parhelia and didnt get all much in the way in improvement either in 2D or even 3D. I plan on keeping the card...but I have no idea what I use in next, since in all likelyhood this will be my last Matrox Graphics Video Card that I wind up getting at the Rate things are going with M

[Wombat]

Yes, methinks that Matrox's driver quality is swirling the drain. OpenGL team is (reportedly) gone. They don't even fix driver bugs in Half-Life based games (one of the biggest markets out there).

[3dfx]

You've got to be bullshiting me right???? They're are not going to release openGL updates??? I thought their next driver release was in the works and was only being held up because MS were assesing the DX part for Dx 9

[K6-III]

I certainly hope that Wombat is indeed BS'ing....

[Wombat]

I didn't say they weren't going to release OGL updates. I said that, according to fairly reliable sources (go check TCB), they had an OGL center in Florida that has been closed down and laid off. I'm sure they still have a couple of coders that are capable of OGL programming, but losing that team is just more bad news for end users.

[K6-III]

Yeah....scares the hell outta me....

[Indiana]

But then, considering the overall quality of Matrox OGL drivers, maybe it's a good thing when there are finally some other coders looking at this task....

[Wombat]

That depends. You guys used to believe that the ICD was written by somebody else. I notice that those rumors have tapered off lately.

[DGhost]

the Matrox OGL ICD is still better than the crap ATI calls drivers...

sure its not as fast, but oh well...