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Matrox Parhelia-512 High Fidelity Graphics

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What good is a hardware review with no hardware to review?
Is it the same as vaporware review?
 
im still just gonna get a Ti4400.
i like certain aspects of Nvidia.


R300 shows major promise too

-Malakai
 
well, i dont like the possibility taht AA wont work in some games, i dont like broken features.

and no z culling is gonna mean a serious performace hit in outdoor area's of JK2 and games like that.

-Malakai
 
I like matrox alot more than nvidia...

they make cards to be Graphics cards, not gaming cards...yus I wouldnt mind a gaming card, but if theres something just as fast but makes it look dandy, then show me the way
 
i still don't think its time to trade in the old radeon 8500 yet. it's got good enough quality that i would notice on my monitor and my overclock is amazing! i'll wait to see what r300 has to offer before i make any final desicions
 
I just read about it at Tech Report- all I can say is OMG!

I should probably wait until I see actual silicon to have an opinion, but that's no fun , is it? :) It's weird, nobody even has so much as a picture of this card. All I can see on the web are the same dozen Matrox-supplied screenshots. If this wasn't Matrox, a company I trust, I'd be thinking Bitboys!

Look at the Die size!!! 80 million transistors! All flipping at 250mhz. It's more than double the size of an XP, on a 150mm wafer! Can you say 'size of a truck? Imagine the heat output this thing is gonna have. More than TWICE the trannie count of an XP.... my prediction is that this thing will be a ***** and a half for us OCers to cool.

All the super cool features add up to precisely squat, IMHO. We're still waiting for freakin T&L to become common in games, so what are the chances any Parhelia features will be implemented in software in my lifetime?

The 10-bit color feature, however, now that I like quite a lot. And you can't go wrong with a 256bit memory bus!!

Well, time will tell what this card is worth. Here's hoping we have an honest-to-God 3rd player in the vid card market again!
 
80 Million transistors on a 120mm die at 0.15 Micron produces very little heat running at 350MHz. Matrox decided to stick with the 4-pipe GPU architecture because of the fact that 8-pipe architectures (NV30 and R300) would produce 25% more heat and would require more room in the already Huge GPU.

This GPU ran so cool with early prototypes that Matrox decided to improve the 1MB on-die full speed Cache to 2MB. There is soo much heat spreader in the GPU that you dont even need a fan to cool the GPU on the 350MHz model with the stock heatsink.

Although the heatsink is massive!, the GPU puts out about as much heat as a GeForce2 GTS. I've seen GTS's run without fans before.



AXIA
 
Remember that NV30 will be a hard to beat target since it has many key features over the Parhelia.

The NV30 runs at 400MHz and features an 8-pipe Unit rendering 4 textures per pass (pipe). Even using 0.13 Micron technology, this GPU will produce insane amounts of heat near that of a 1GHz Athlon or Pentium3 processor.

The NV35 will have the T&L unit outside the GPU (TT&L) lowering temperatures greatly leaving room for Nvidia to clock up the NV35 to 500MHz while still using 0.13 Micron technology.

Memory on the other hand is running cooler than ever. Using state of the art BGA packaging, Nvidia is able to remove the heatsinks from its memory chips and give even greator clock speeds than ever before. Current 325MHz DDR models use 0.11 Micron fab technology and are scaled right up to 400MHz DDR (800MHz SDR).

Samsung has already begun shipping 400MHz DDR models to manufacturers of the TI 4600 boards to increase stability at insane overclocks. Joytek will be the first to use the Samsung 800MHz SDR (400MHz DDR) models.

http://www.joytech.com/index-4600.htm

This is currently the fastest HOME graphics card that money can buy. Its got the 800MHz capable ram on it.



AXIA
 
holy ****!

thats one hell of a card right there.

im looking for a Ti4400 with 2.8ns ram, Asus has a few floating around, i wonder if Joytech will make one?

-Malakai
 
yah, i actually have a GTS- it does run fine with no heatsink at all. But that just means it's more tolerant of heat- the sucker got to 50 C! The GTS runs hot as hell. Oh, and the pic of the Matrox card with that huge HSF stuck on it floating around the net is not the stock unit. A stock would never eat a PCI slot- my $$ sez the true stock cooler will look a lot like every other card cooler we've seen.

I fail to see how 80million transistors at 250mhz can be cooler than 32 million of the same speed? >10 watts will never be 'very little heat' as far as I'm concerned. Sure it's easier to cool, cuz it's spread out over a *much* larger die than other cards, but it's still frikkin hot! Well it doesn't really matter anyway- it can be as hot as Matrox wants to build it, as long as it works, right? :)

I'm eagerly awaiting some benchmarks! Plus I think the tilted RAM looks cool as hell:D

:edit: oops, i coulda sworn it was on a .20 die. There goes a lotta the heat right there, being on a .15.
 
I dont know much about this card but I know that the new AGP pro cards will require one open PCI slot below the AGP card and there are some AGP pro cards that use an even higher voltage and require 2 open PCI slots below the AGP slot. Perhaps this card will use AGP pro, Ill try to see if I can dig up that article later or tomorrow if I can remember...

well I just did a quick search and I didnt find the article I read before but I found one on Tom's Hardware that says the same thing:

AGP Pro Cooling
 
Last edited:
If the prices go down to $300, i AM GETTING THIS CARD! 16x FSAA! And i bet the 2d quality and features will be amaing like matroxs other products as well. jeesh. i wonder what nvidias respnce to this will be
 
Monster of Rock said:

Look at the Die size!!! 80 million transistors! All flipping at 250mhz. It's more than double the size of an XP, on a 150mm wafer! Can you say 'size of a truck? Imagine the heat output this thing is gonna have. More than TWICE the trannie count of an XP.... my prediction is that this thing will be a ***** and a half for us OCers to cool.
Click to expand...

I think Matrox has left room for improvements since this is an entirely new chip, so proly this time next they will then move to 0.13 or even lower and crank the core up otherwise it wouldn't be profitable had they started with a finer process...Just a thought.
 
wow, I never even ONCE considered that a stock cooler would intentionally block a PCI slot! That's wild, the thing must run hotter than I thought! I guess that means I'll have to change my vid card cooler to block two PCI slots now, so I can stay hardcore! lol :)

AXIA, re: those pics of the card with the huge cooler on it, I've seen mention at a couple places that that is NOT the cooler that will be shipped with the card. That's a preproduction version of the card in there, the huge cooler is to gaurantee there will be no heat problems. At least, this is what I gather from reading around the web! I'll have to wait and see what the retail version comes with. There was a blurb on hardocp with the shot of the card and that big cooler, and a note saying that was NOT the stock cooler, among other places.

bm1- welcome to the forums! Yes, the possible move to .15 leaves Matrox with plenty of wiggle room. This could be Matrox's version of the GF2 DDR/ GF2 GTS jump.

So when are all the NDAs lifted, and we can see actual shots of the card with benchmarks??
 
yup, technically, You wont even need a fan for the Parhelia-512 GPU. I believe Matrox is using a HUGE heatsink (Flat,not tall) to cool the GPU down.

So, you will be able to use all your slots with the stock heatsink.
But then again, they got those cards up at 400MHz in Japan with that huge heatsink so thats an overclocking thing;)


AXIA
 
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