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The goal of this review was to test if the Matrox G450 PCI would make a good secondary card for a multi-monitor system.
Test system
Dell Precision 210 with dual P2-400, 384 MB RAM. Additional video cards were an AGP Diamond Viper 770 Ultra (Nvidia TNT2 Ultra chipset) and a Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro (3Dlabs Permedia2 chipset). Main testing was done on Windows 2000 SP1, quick tests for proper operation were also done on Windows Me and Windows XP Beta 2.
Drivers used:
- Windows 2000: 5.52.010
- Windows Me: 6.51.012
- Windows XP: default drivers from XP
Hardware
2x VGA connector
no fan
16 MB RAM
Maximum resolutions:
VGA 1 - 2048 x 1536
VGA 2 - 1600 x 1200 |
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Important: according to Matrox, the card doesn't have full support for non-Intel chipsets (such as chipsets from VIA, Ali or AMD). Missing features are: bus mastering, OpenGL and DVDMax. I only tested on a system with an Intel 440BX chipset, so I can't give you any more information on this issue, but I think that when using the card as secondary, this probably won't be a problem as you can't use OpenGL and DVDMax anyway.
G450 as secondary card
The card worked very well as secondary on all tested systems. It had no problems working together with the primary AGP card and another secondary PCI card.
2D quality was excellent on both heads (VGA outputs), but not all other features are supported on the second head:
- video overlays: only on head 1
- Direct3D: accelerated on both heads
- OpenGL: accelerated only on head 1, and only if it is the primary monitor. On Windows 2000, you don't need to disable secondary monitors to get OpenGL acceleration
- gamma adjustment: only on head 1
Matrox software
Included as part of the drivers is the QuickDesk software, a tray-based utility with several useful features.
MultiDesk is a nice virtual desktop manager, with support for desktop toolbars on secondary desktops.
eDualHead, which adds several unique features to Internet Explorer 5.5 or later, is a separate download.
Most of these features also work on non-G450 monitors. |
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Swap Active Window: moves the active window to the previous monitor. Doesn't resize windows that don't fit on the destination monitor.
Swap All Windows: moves all windows left by one monitor.
PixelTOUCH: zooms the area around the current cursor position on the monitor with the cursor. Works only on head 1 of the G450.
Find Mouse Pointer: draws a large blinking crosshair around the cursor.
Desktop Schemes: lets you store and later activate different monitor configurations. Can't be used to disable all secondary monitors if the G450 is secondary, because the QuickDesk software doesn't run if no Matrox card is active.
Desktop Icon Arrangement: looks like a useful feature, but didn't do anything on my system.
eDualHead adds three special features to Internet Explorer:
- PageJump: when you start PageJump, two Internet Explorer windows are opened. Clicking a link while pressing CTRL causes the link to open in the other of the two windows. You are limited to only two windows
- PageWrap: this should allow you to spread a single web page across multiple browser windows, so that you don't need to scroll down. This didn't work at all on my system, always crashed
- PageLog: shows a list of visited pages. I didn't find this very useful, due to the way the pages are nested (see screenshot below). Would be much more useful if the site structure were preserved, or if there was no further nesting below the domain, just like the history in Internet Explorer
A note on DualHead Zoom, Clone and DVDMax: these are other modes of operation of the G450, but aren't particularly useful when using the card as secondary. Zoom and Clone did work fine in the test configuration, DVDMax didn't work at all due to the lack of overlay support on the second head.
Conclusion
This is a great card for secondary monitors. It is inexpensive (US$ 115), readily available, has excellent 2D quality and uses only a single PCI slot. The only disappointment is lack of overlay support on the second head.
The last point is also the reason why I didn't replace both of my PCI cards with the G450: I'm currently using the AGP and PCI Nvidia cards, and the first head of the G450, with DualHead disabled. So far no problems at all. See the configuration here.
More information
Questions or comments? Post them to the forum.
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