Matrox G450e-TV Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

While not at the forefront of gaming solutions, Matrox has made quite a name for themselves in the business community with their superior image quality and unique features like the uber-cool DualHead technology. (DualHead, if you aren’t already aware, provides support for two displays to run on a single card – while it may not sound all that great at first, once you go dual, you can’t look back.)

The Matrox Marvel G450 eTV is aimed at users looking for an "all-in-one graphics solution for home entertainment and the Web" and is essentially a low-cost version of the Marvel G400-TV that was released back in 1999. The G400-TV featured a 128-bit Single Data Rate (SDR) memory bus whereas the G450 eTV has a 64-bit Double Data Rate bus. The net bandwidth is the same, but the 64-bit bus is cheaper to produce, lowering the cost of the card. With the current state of memory prices, the 32MB of DDR RAM on the G450 eTV costs less than the 16MB of SDR on the G400-TV. Pretty sweet.

With 3Dfx out of the way, Matrox’s main competitor in the consumer-level desktop video market is ATI with their popular All In Wonder line. As I have used several AiW cards in my day, I will be making a few comparisons between these products where appropriate.

Specs

• 0.18-micron technology
• 32MB DDR RAM on a 64-bit Double Data Rate (DDR) external bus to frame buffer memory
• Full AGP 4X device with multi-threaded bus mastering (AGP 2X and 4X support)
• 360 MHz Primary RAMDAC with integrated 230MHz Secondary RAMDAC
• Integrated TV encoder
• 3D Rendering Array Process architecture
• 32 MB frame buffer configurations supported
• 16bit, 24bit, and 32-bit Z-buffer including 8-bit stencil buffer
• DVD & video playback
• Matrox DualHead TV Out (with eDualHead)
• MPEG-2 capture and playback
• S-video and composite video input /output
• Timeshifting with picture-in-picture
• TV tuner with Personal Video Recorder
• Closed captioning (North America)
• Teletext browsing (Europe)

Unlike the Marvel G400, the outputs on the card only allow a television to be used as a secondary display, providing no support for a second monitor. This is detrimental for obvious reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it makes DualHead more of a novelty rather than a true power-user’s feature.

This card does however support Matrox’s new “eDualHead” feature (which its older sibling did not support) that uses Internet Explorer to view the Internet in an interesting new way. eDualHead has three modes (see below): PageWrap continues, or “wraps”, the content on a webpage from the bottom of the main display to the top of the second display, reducing the amount of scrolling needed to read a long page; PageLog keeps a record of the sites you have surfed in an organized tree structure (ie: www.neoseeker.com would start the tree, www.neoseeker.com/articles and www.neoseeker.com/forums would branch of from there, the structure becoming more complex the longer you surf on a particular site); and PageJump (my favourite of the 3) opens up new links in the opposite window in which it was clicked which is especially useful when searching for or comparing information on multiple pages.

eDualHead is definitely an intriguing and unique feature, but its “raditude” is severely hampered by the fact that the second display is a television. I remember the days when my Vic 20 and Commodore 64 systems used television sets as a main display – it seems cute, funny, and almost sad now, which is why I don’t find it all that radical to be using one as a secondary display over 10 years later.