Ahh, finally a GOOD Parhelia review ;)

[DGhost]

hmm, except the chip is the wrong shape for that... the parhelia acctually uses 2 chrontel 7301's for the DVI output, the one up top could be a DVI chip, but it just seems a little odd to have a third, especially when the packaging is different...

hmmm, an up close picture of the chip would help a lot...

[knarf]

My first post on MURC, but I have to start somewhere...

Originally posted by Ali
I find the Less heat output bullet point in the Pros to be odd though. I havent used one so I dont know, but it seems with everybody putting great big fans/heatsinks onto them that it would produce lots of heat.

Ali

For what it is worth the heatsink on my retail P, which I got yesterday, doesn't run as hot as the one on my non-O/C 800MHz slot 1 P-III. This was determined by (antistatically protected) touching each heatsink in turn after around an hour and a halfs worth of IG3 and Reef Demoing.

Way back my G200 ran ridiculously hotter when gaming. From reading the fora it seems to me that the people, who are modding their Parhelias, are doing so because they want to O/C it. Doesn't appear to be an issue for mortal users like myself.

[scrllock]

oh, so it's the only good review, since it was the only one with praise towards the parhelia? Not to mention that it was as pointed out by other posts confusing and hard to follow.

[Ali]

I think the reason we say its a good review is because it doesnt focus exclusively on 3D gaming, but takes real world use into account also.

Those type of reviews are getting very hard to find nowdays.

Ali

[Kruzin]

Exactly.
So many sites do half-arsed reviews, based solely on benchmark scores.
This review is one of the few out there that put games where they belong...as a secondary concern...while concentrating on the more practical side of things.
It's a shame so many people can't grasp this concept.

[knarf]

OK, I cannot keep my mouth shut any longer.

It has now been almost two days since I got my P, and by now it is evidently clear to me that something strange is going on in connection to the online reviews. How does this fictitious paragraph sound to you?

Car reviewer: "Today we pitted this <a href="http://www.rrab.com/rsg_gb.htm" target="_blank">Rolls Royce Silver Ghost</a> against our reference <a href="http://www.lamborghini.com" target="_blank">Lamborghini Diabolo</a> on the test track. I have to tell you up front though, that the RR didn't perform very well there, so I cannot recommend anyone to buy this car, especially not at the asking price."

A reviewer would be ridiculed if something like that was ever printed in any of the major car rags. So why is it that we the computer consumers are willing to accept reviews, which basically makes their conclusion based on a single metric, the raw fps speed in games? Is it because the reviewers, perhaps due to lack of personal experience and background, simply don't have any better standard to use?

The setup you can see in my sig was assembled more or less from spare parts just earlier this week. I wanted a dedicated graphics and gaming machine running Windows, as my main machines all are running some version or other of UNIX. For a number of years I have been an avid amateur photographer (I own 4 cameras, including a digicam), and I am *extremely* picky when it comes to IQ, wether it is in my own work or in the tools I use. I needed a new graphics card to this machine, and despite having read all the reviews of the P I decided to chance it and buy one anyway, unseen and untried, as I really wanted the best in IQ while having the option of a good games when the occasion arises. My local retailer had just gotten the retail P in stock, so I jumped in without checking the depth of the water first.

Already when I had Windows up and running on the P for the first time I immediately raised an eyebrow or two. The reason was that I had temporarily hooked up an old monitor I keep for testing purposes, a 1992 vintage Commodore Amiga C1960 multisync. By todays standards this monitor is not very good by any stretch of imagination. Yet the IQ improvement I saw from the P at 800x600@60Hz when compared with anything else I have had hooked up to this monitor over time was immediate and obvious.

A few moments later I had pulled my 'reference' monitor, a 17" 1997 Hitachi CM630ET, from my workstation, where it is normally feed by my trusty 8MB Millenium II PCI, and connected it to the P. Part of my daytime work is to build workstation and number crunching machines for my employer and others, which I do at home. Over time this monitor have been connected to a fair fraction of the graphics cards out there, though mostly Matrox Millenium II, G200, G450 and G550. I like to believe I know what this monitor is capable of. At least I used to until two days ago.

All the following impressions was made with a monitor resolution of 1024x768@85Hz, 16x FAA where applicable. You really, really need to see this card in action in a completely darkened room on a color calibrated system/monitor. Using it in daylight doesn't bring nearly the same experience. Anyone forming their own mind on this card from reading third party reviews and perhaps a quick glance in the well lit stores are doing themselves (and Matrox) a disfavor IMHO.

After I was done installing and tweaking the monitor settings, plus calibrating the monitor profile with the supplied tools (how many reviews mentioned those?), I just sat there for a while enjoying the show (IG3, Reef Demo).

As the sun set I called a friend over, because I needed an unbiased opinion from a non-visually focused person. I wondered if I were imagining things. My friend as my self has around two decades worth of computer experience as serious programmers and gamers, and together we must have worked on every major platform on the planet, including some embedded ones. He has programmed games in OpenGL and is a 'performance-first' type of person. Normally he doesn't care much about IQ, he leaves it to yours truly to worry about 'insignificant' polishing like that.

For the next hour and a half (after which I tested the heat sink temperature as mentioned above), we sat next to each other, oogling what happened on my monitor. It should be mentioned that my friend is very accustomed to the CM630ET, he has been using it and looking at it as well since I got it.

Some snippets from the ensuing conversation:

Him: "But that is a photograph..." (Looking from above at the paused stingray in the Reef Demo. I don't entirely agree, but you get the point.)

Him: "So people spend tons of cash on the best monitors, when all they had to do was to demand better graphics cards..."

Him: "Oh my gosh! You can see the darkened ship in front of the black asteroid!" (IG3 demo.)

Him: "Now *that* is what I call yellow." (Looking at the <a href="http://www.cdv.de/_index.html" target="_blank">CDV</a> crescent boot logo in the IG3 demo.)

Him: "Does it come with drivers for the Mac?"
Me : "No."
Him: "Ouch. Apple, look out."

Me : "I'm going to make this machine my main graphics and photo editing platform."
Him: Looking at me like I just told him the sun rises in the east. "Yes. Good plan."

A note about the impression of color when using a P as a video source, something that seems to be missing almost entirely in all the reviews I have read so far.

The P seemingly expands the color gamut that can be shown on any given monitor. Of course it cannot do that, but it sure looks that way to us here. The high quality video signal apparently is able to better limit the 'bleeding' of the video signal/electron beam into adjacent off colored pixels, so the deep colors gets ... deeper.

For photographers the best way I can describe the effect is to consider Fuji Velvia slide film, slightly under-exposed and looked at using a Schneider loupe and a good light table. The P goes beyond that experience. Insanely stunning and saturated colors to die for, combined with a contrast you wouldn't believe. You can have two complementary colored surfaces meeting at a straight line, and there is no residual color mixing going on at the boundary that we were able to see. One pixel is green, the next red (or whatever).

For the non-photographers: Try looking at the front of your computer cases. Chances are good that you have one or more brightly lit Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) there making a show of themselves. Exercise: Open a graphics program of your choice and try to mimic the visual impression of those colors on the screen. You need a completely darkened room to be able to judge how close you can get. The P gets there.

In the IG3 demo some of the ships have blinking anti-collision warning lights (In space? Huh? Whatever... ). On some ships the beacons are of the size of a single pixel, often on a black background. Those pixel beacons are *red*, *yellow* etc. *Red* as in deeply saturated warning beacon red.

And those explosions when a ship goes *KABOOM!* The ensuing fade in the background of the fireball back to black... Absolutely no banding. Priceless. Don't show those to a graphics pro unless you feel like selling your P.

Interestingly we both had a side impression from the visual color quality of the P, something we only discovered after a while of discussion. When you see a color on the screen that isn't one of the deeply saturated primary colors, then you more or less consciously realize that this color is there because the programmer or designer has chosen it for this application. Not because this is the level that your hardware limits the visuals to.

In the Reef Demo the background water is a pale blue shade. But it is a *clear* whitish blue. Does that make sense? Probably not, and it wouldn't have to me either before I had seen the P do it.

Price: If you try to throw together a gaming machine for fragging your friends at the next LAN party, looking for the maximum killerhurtz for your buck, then buy a Ti4200. If you have an even halfway serious interest in computer graphics, especially digital photography and design work, then you will already have been looking at spending $2400 for a contemporary P4 machine, prosumer digicam and Photoshop. The $400 Parhelia is not going to break your budget and you want it.

Performance in connection to games: Two sides here. A) My impression so far is that if the P cannot do the job, then I don't want to play the game in question. This is when using my not exactly state of the art setup mentioned below. I don't have cobra like reflexes for more. B) The game companies will be shooting themselves in their feet by releasing games in the near future with hardware requirements above those the P can chew. Then we are talking Ti4600, Radeon 9700 and NV30 only plus something near the top of the line for an Intel/AMD platform. In the current economic climate your average consumer is not rushing out to buy something like that. I might add that the often very vocal posters to hardware sites is not what I understand as an average consumer.

Conclusion: nVidia and ATI, from my point of view you can take your frame-rates and ... *COUGH!* My guess is that the phones are ringing themselves off the hooks in Matrox' sales department(s).

Disclaimer: No-one has asked me to write this informal and purely subjective mini review, I am not compensated for it in any way and as far as I know Matrox doesn't even know that I exist. I just feel that the P doesn't get the fair treatment and perspective it deserves.

How about making a poll among current P owners to get their reaction? /Yay!/Hmm, OK/Nay. I surely have an opinion on a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, but it is mostly speculation as I have never seen one in real life.

[nmaia]

Beautifull!!!

One of the best reviews i've ever seen!!!

I think knarf realy said it all the right way.

[moreau]

Bravo!

Three Cheers...

Now if you will excuse me, I must go wipe these tears of happiness from my eyes...

Dr. Moreau

[xortam]

Nicely done knarf. I enjoy reading subjective reviews over questionable benchmark results. The problem I'm seeing is that Matrox isn't selling as much of this product as they could if there were some more enlightened reviews to counter the FPS benchmark reviews. I went to my local computer store the other day to see when they were getting the P since they are one of the few stores around that stock Matrox cards (Central Computer for you Bay Area folks). My usual salesman countered with "Why would anyone want that card?" He referred to all the poor reviews the card has gotten. I had to explain to him that the poor reviews are due to the poor methods (not testing FPS deltas and such) and that the subjective reviews by owners counter those poor reviews. I told him that the user has to play with the card and see the IQ and witness the gaming smoothness to really judge the card. He finally admitted that they should go ahead and get a few of the cards in to check them out and at least give the Matrox customers a chance at the card. They've always had various Matrox G-series cards available. It was disappointing that a Matrox vendor wouldn't have even stocked the card at all if it wasn't for a customer like me pushing them.

[ZokesPro]

Originally posted by Kruzin
Exactly.
So many sites do half-arsed reviews, based solely on benchmark scores.
This review is one of the few out there that put games where they belong...as a secondary concern...while concentrating on the more practical side of things.
It's a shame so many people can't grasp this concept.

I grap the concept, too bad my bank account can't!

I so WANT a Parhelia!