Matrox G450: AGP vs PCI question

[Vitechka]

Here we go: I'm a designer. I need a card which will give me excellent 2d quality, so my choice is quite clear: Matrox G450 32Mb DualHead (G400/G400MAX is already impossible to get and 2d quality of G550 is heard to be somewhat worse than of G450).

The question is: PCI or AGP? The motherboard will be either Asus P4T533-C or Intel D850EMVR. With a PCI card i will be able to plug some cool 3d card into AGP slot (like ATI Radeon 9700 Pro) and spend some free time on games (I still love some of them).

But... If any of you tells me that the 2d quality of PCI version is one percent WORSE than the quality of the AGP card, or it just has some problems, which do not appear on AGP - I'll surely buy the AGP card and forget about games...

I would also love to hear from you about the following: are there any general disagvantages when using a PCI card instead of AGP, when no 3d is needed? Lack of perfomance? Possible problems?

Thank you.

[WyWyWyWy]

Ever considered Parhelia?
Good 2D and okay 3D.

I don't think there is 32mb G450 PCI, only 16mb, even if there is, there are some problems with G450 PCI on some chipsets.

Also... hmm... I'm not sure if it is true, but P4T533 only accepts 1.5v AGP cards.

[Wombat]

Yes, but "some chipsets" is non-Intel chipsets. Aren't both of those boards running Intel chips?

[WyWyWyWy]

Yes but when these "new" Intel chipsets are not exactly the same as "old" chipsets... so I'm not so sure about 845/850 series.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

okay. see sig. i am using a p4t533-c w/a g550. no problem there.

about the 1.5V problem that some people have... apparently mine is fine. i am running the card at 1.5V (4X)

my guess is the PCI would be slower in 2D simpily because it doesn't have 32MB Memory. About 2D quality... the G550 is by far excellent. Some poeple say the G4xx is better than G5xx, or vice versa. There's an analog output quality tests of a wide range of cards, from G550 to parhelia to G4xx to Radeons... I think G550 came out as the best card of all.

No offend or anything but IMO some of these 2D comparisons are just fan talks. All the G-cards (400 and up) are of high quality and already getting to a point where 2D is uncomparable. So i think u can stick with G550.

Having commenting about the G550...
I think the best configuration would probably be Radeon 9500 and a Matrox G450 PCI, although I am not sure if ATI drivers would actually work with PowerDesk or not... And of course you get 3 monitors too

[Vitechka]

WyWyWyWy, concerning Parhelia... Well, is the 2D quality (especially in high resolutions such as 1600x1200) is not worse than on G450? Then I'll try to consider Parhelia, but I've already heard that its 3D perfomance is worse than on Radeon 9700.

So, concerning my first question. I guess it's okay to use G450 PCI, right? The chipset will be from Intel, for sure (i850 or i845pe or even granite bay). No lack of 2d perfomance or quality in PCI? No problems at all?

[WyWyWyWy]

I don't own a G450, but as far as I can tell, the 2D quality is about the same as G400. The 3D performance... no match for 9700. The speed is about the same as GeForce3 or 8500 (depends).

No matter PCI or AGP... the 2D performance is going to be much slower than modern cards... there is not even hardware pixel-alphabending acceleration.

[Bigg]

The parhelia doesn't do 16x12, unless you use dualheadHF, which is pointless. in that case get a radeon 9500 etc...

[Jon P. Inghram]

The parhelia doesn't do 16x12, unless you use dualheadHF, which is pointless. in that case get a radeon 9500 etc...

What the hell are you talking about? Of course the Parhelia does 1600x1200!

Unless you actually mean 16x12... in that case you might be right, the Parhelia probably doesn't support that low of a resolution.

Also, on Matrox's own site they've got 32 meg PCI G450's for sale. I think that'd be your best bet if you want to leave your AGP slot open.

[Kruzin]

Originally posted by Bigg
The parhelia doesn't do 16x12, unless you use dualheadHF, which is pointless. in that case get a radeon 9500 etc...

????
Parhelia will go up to 2048x1536 in singlehead mode.

[WyWyWyWy]

What is dualheadHF anyway?

[Bigg]

it won't go above even 12x10 in triplehead, and unless you are driving a video monitor, then you might as well get a radeon (for speed) or a g500 (for image quality freaks)

[FormerEx-SalesSoup]

Originally posted by WyWyWyWy
What is dualheadHF anyway?

"DualHead-HF is powered by two full-featured display controllers, two 400MHz 10-bit RAMDACs, a 10-bit TV encoder and dual 165MHz DVI output support. With DualHead-HF, Parhelia-512 is capable of displaying dual 2048 x 1536 @ 32bpp analog outputs or dual 1600 x 1200 @ 32bpp digital outputs with hardware overlays, hardware cursors and gamma correction for video."