G550 best of all for 2D?

[Rags]

Originally posted by GNEP
Ditto to Rags. It's still expensive though.

Gnep

Expensive? I don't think it's that terrible.

What you get for your money compared to competing products, I think the price is not so bad then. For 2D work, there is not a finer card out there. For mutlimonitor work, it's unmatched in its price class.

Having great 3D performance is just a bonus IMHO.

Rags

[GT98]

I think the point he was making is adding in the Price of the Parhelia ($350+) and the Price of 3 Matching Montiors if you wanted to be anal can get to be pretty pricey.

I personally felt that the Performance in Triplehead wasn't all that great in America's Army and some other games. So I went and got a Radeon 9700 and sold my extra 19 in monitors to pay for it. Still have a 21incher to game and work on and thinking about a 20in LCD for dual head.

The jury on the 2D Performance/Image Quatily is still out since I only played with it for a couple hours last night before going to bed. Runs CFS3 like a champ...double the FPS of the Parhelia and thats without a fresh OS install.

[GNEP]

Not quite what I meant. I bought a P and love it. But it is not and never will be at this price a mainstream card.

2 extra 2nd hand/refurbed monitors can be pretty cheap - and don't really need to be matching for a lot of tasks - I got a couple of cheapo ex-demo Dell 17"ers to surround my nice flat 19" Samsung 900IFT.

What I meant was that for 99.9% of people, even those who want 3 screens, there is a cheaper way of achieving it than buying the Parhelia. PCI cards for example.

The unique things are surround gaming and the P-Desk features - but for 3 monitor 2d work a dualhead AGP card and a PCI card should work fine for < half the price. And that's for decent quality too - eg G400s 2nd hand or whatever.

But for some (my 0.1% of people) it hits the right balance and we will stretch our budgets to accomodate it. Great 2d quality; 3 screens and GF4 3d speed. It's just that that isn't most people's sweet spot.

Gnep

[Kurt]

Originally posted by GNEP
Not quite what I meant. I bought a P and love it. But it is not and never will be at this price a mainstream card.

2 extra 2nd hand/refurbed monitors can be pretty cheap - and don't really need to be matching for a lot of tasks - I got a couple of cheapo ex-demo Dell 17"ers to surround my nice flat 19" Samsung 900IFT.

What I meant was that for 99.9% of people, even those who want 3 screens, there is a cheaper way of achieving it than buying the Parhelia. PCI cards for example.

The unique things are surround gaming and the P-Desk features - but for 3 monitor 2d work a dualhead AGP card and a PCI card should work fine for < half the price. And that's for decent quality too - eg G400s 2nd hand or whatever.

But for some (my 0.1% of people) it hits the right balance and we will stretch our budgets to accomodate it. Great 2d quality; 3 screens and GF4 3d speed. It's just that that isn't most people's sweet spot.

Gnep

If it weren't for the stupid banding issue I'd have bought one already as well as proposed it as a standard part in some high-end configuration. I can live with the not stellar 3D performance and I'd rather have one card installed that various -it's easier to configure with one two or theree screen than adding cards all the time.

I don't feel like buying 10 or 15 cards to find the one not affected for my personal use. Besides, at 400+ EUR a pop it's quite expensive for a DH card so I can't recommend it over cards that cost half the price and perform "similarly" (heck even a 50 EUR Radeon VE will do the trick -albeit not as well as an M card....).

one solution: fix the banding problem (seems a rather complex issue from a customer standpoint...)

[The PIT]

My G550 was better in 2d than my G400. So far my best cards in 2d go.

G550
G400 running nicely at work saving my eyes.
Radeon 9700 just over the
Radeon 8500.

[chaoliang]

The price was for me not the biggest issue. If Parhelia had the best 2D quality [it seems to be not quite sure] and no hardware issues, I could have bought one. We knew already that the card would be very expensive before it was brought out. If everything were top I would be ready to pay top money for it. But if not, it would be very difficult to make the decision.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

lol, as you are probably aware banding issue right? for me it just sounds like an alpha hardware bug, and buying parhelia 4x gives me shivers that i am paying ~500 canadian for alpha silicons

[Maggi]

Originally posted by chaoliang
The price was for me not the biggest issue. If Parhelia had the best 2D quality [it seems to be not quite sure] ...

if you disregard the banding, the Parhelia is the card with best 2D quality and speed ...

[chaoliang]

Maggi, are you really sure that Parhelia has better 2D than G550 (except memory bus and Giga-Color)? I mean signal quality or something like that. You've surely read the techchanel test. Sorry to mention this article again, but the different judgements confuse me further. I'm also thinking about the passive cooling of G550.

[Maggi]

I doubt that anybody could really see a visual difference between G550 and Parhelia when both are using identical settings, but seeing that Parhelia comes with two 400MHz RAMDACs make it obvious that you can run it in higher resolutions and refresh rates ...

Ever since I set my working rig to 1600x1200x32bpp @ 100Hz (independant DH on two 22" VGAs), I have a hard time having to work on anything below that ... plus Parhelia is a lot faster in that res.

I don't give a sh*t for "measured quality", it's my eyes that count and those are telling me to choose a Parhelia over a G550.

[Greebe]

I don't give a sh*t for "measured quality", it's my eyes that count and those are telling me to choose a Parhelia over a G550.

Right 'O MaggiO

[Chrono_Wanderer]

hehehe... speed is important i guess. who's up for 2DMark2003?

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Chrono_Wanderer
hehehe... speed is important i guess. who's up for 2DMark2003?

hehe ... got a link ?

but while you're at it, I noticed that MadOnion went back to their former company name "Futuremark"

[Kurt]

Originally posted by chaoliang
Maggi, are you really sure that Parhelia has better 2D than G550 (except memory bus and Giga-Color)? I mean signal quality or something like that. You've surely read the techchanel test. Sorry to mention this article again, but the different judgements confuse me further. I'm also thinking about the passive cooling of G550.

You sound like you really want to buy the G550...you should probably do it if you're not sure about the P. Can't go wrong with M's second best 2D card.

[chaoliang]

Originally posted by Kurt
You sound like you really want to buy the G550...you should probably do it if you're not sure about the P. Can't go wrong with M's second best 2D card.

Did you mean G400MAX or Parhelia the best? Should I try to get a G400Max instead? The refurbished card is not available in Europe.