Matrox Millennium G450 DualHead review

Last update 2000-09-26.

Here it is: G450 landed happily on my desk. For those interested in my opinion, some basic facts and judgements.

The box

The board arrived via UPS, packed carefully as usual by Matrox people. I wish they were that precise while filling the shipping docs too...
The not-so-big shipping box contained brand-new G450 retail box. The box is worth more than just mentioning: it's very different from the boxes used by Matrox so far. First, it's not that big, just alittle bit taller than Microsoft Office retail box. Second, it opens like a book, but just to reveal some G450 facts. To take the board out, you should open it on its smallest side, and then you encounter a little surprise: no more shaking and tearing. The inner box holding the card and cables has two holes - just right to put the fingers in and draw the inner box out of its cover. Why am I describing this... you see, it's good to know that someone actually thinks of user's convenience.
Inside the inner box there are two compartments: one holding the card secured with pieces of foam, another for the TV breakout cable.
There were no CDs nor manual, since my packege was a preproduction one.
The breakout cable looks exactly like its G400 older brother. Again, it's just an adaptor cable. You still need either RCA (cinch) cable or S-Video cable to connect the TV set.

The board

The board, PCB#975, is significantly smaller than the G400 board. It contains the G450 chip, 4 64Mbit DDR SDRAM memory chips and the EEPROM serving as BIOS storage.
The AGP edge connector is compatible with both 2x and 4x boards (operating at lower supply voltage).
There are two outputs on the board, and the PCB is designed in such way that it can accomodate either two VGA connectors, VGA and Digital Panel or VGA and video (cinch). The Millennium G450 DH proudly carries two blue VGA connectors.
The G450 chip is covered with medium-size heatsink. For those loving kinky stuff, the heat sink is grounded using big silver screw and thicj orange wire. There is only one connector on the board that looks like VESA feature one. There is no possibility of memory expansion.
The memory used on my board is 6ns DDR SDRAM from Hyundai.

The CDs

I already told you that I didn't get any CD, right?

Hardware installation

The hardware installation was trivial. I removed my old Mystique G200 and replaced it with the new G450 board (my G400 sits in another machine). I made a big mistake and allowed Windows to update the driver. Never do it with Matrox cards. Instruct Windows to Cancel the driver installation and run PowerDesk Setup instead.
After two reboots I was able to do what I should do at the beginning, and voila - G450 is here, sort of working (you know, these beta drivers...).
It's output quality is astonishing. For the first time I was able to run my Iiyama as God intended, at 1280x960 @ 85 Hz. No blurrs.
The system I installed the G450 in is not exactly what we call speed demon: WinChip C6-180 MHz on a FIC VA503. It will probably be upgraded soon. Unlike my G200, the G450 immediately negotiated the AGP speed to be 2x on my very old board.
Fortunately I was lucjy enough to get the new system: Soltek 75KV Socket A motherboard with AMD Duron 600 MHz CPU. Wait a few days unil I get everything running (still waiting for the right memory - 128 MB, PC133).

Video quality - DualHead - G450 at its most

Knowing that G450 is not exactly a gamer's delight, I decided to try its best feature - improved DualHead. For those waiting to upgrade the G400 to G450: it's generally not worth the money. The only real reason to replace G400 with G450 is its improved DualHead. Unlike G400 chip, the G450 contains the second output circuitry right on chip (G400 used MAVEN chip as external RAMDAC and video encoder). This results in higher bandwidth of second RAMDAC.
I connected two Iiyama 17" Vision Master Pro monitors to the card. That's what it really likes. Iiyama A70x series monitors are high quality professional 17-inchers based on Mitsubishi Diamondtron (Sony Trinitron alike) CRTs. They have very good electronics and provide clear, crisp image as long as the video controller is capable of feeding them with a good quality signal. My two Iiyamas liked the G450 much more than G200. there was a visible difference in picture quality, so I decoded to go from 1152x864 I used on my G200 on single monitor to 1280x960 on both monitors. After a few mouseclicks and convincing the G450 to run both monitors at 85Hz vertical sync frequency (essential if you want to keep your eyes in good condition while spending 10 hours daily at the screens), I got what I wanted. It works. It really works. It works really GOOD!
Very sharp image on two monitors in 1280x960@85Hz, 32-bit color is what you can get only from G450 today. Go for it if you are a professional spending most of the time at your computer screen - you won't regret it.

(to be continued...)