The goal for this review was to build a 4-monitor system, mainly for 2D applications. I reviewed two solutions, an inexpensive system using 2 Matrox G450 cards (one AGP, one PCI), and a high-end system using a single Matrox G200 MMS card with TV tuner and video-in.

Test system

Dell Precision 210 with dual P2-400, 384 MB RAM. All testing was done on Windows 2000 SP2, unless otherwise noted.

G450 AGP + PCI

Hardware

Both cards use heat sinks instead of fans for cooling, which reduces noise. Each card has two VGA connectors. The AGP card also has TV-out, which is implemented using a special cable that plugs into the second VGA port and has S-Video and composite outputs on the other end.

RAM: AGP: 32 MB, 16 MB per monitor PCI: 16 MB, 8 MB per monitor Maximum resolutions: VGA 1 - 2048 x 1536 VGA 2 - 1600 x 1200 Cost: AGP: US$ 135 PCI: US$ 115 = US$ 250 for both cards

Installation

I used the latest drivers, version 5.52.010. Important: you have to install the drivers using the setup program (setup.exe), otherwise true multi-monitor support for Windows 2000 won't be installed. If Windows prompts for drivers, just hit Cancel and then run the driver setup program.

2x G450 on Windows 2000

Display quality

Display quality and refresh speed are excellent, the Matrox driver also has gamma controls if you need to adjust display colors.

Video

Overlays are only available on the first port of each card. Video quality is surprisingly good on the other two monitors, but because of the increased load on the processor due to the lack of overlays frames may be dropped, depending on the speed of your system.

Multimedia

DVD playback works fine, Matrox includes a player made by Ravisent. Note that a fast CPU is required: on my P2-400, there was noticeable stuttering in fast-moving scenes. Apparently the G450 leaves quite a bit of the work to the CPU: on the same system, my GeForce3 and GeForce2 MX cards can play DVDs flawlessly at less than 100% CPU utilization.
3D acceleration is decent, but not comparable to current-generation Nvidia and ATI cards. OpenGL acceleration is available on the BIOS primary monitor (which also needs to be primary in Windows 2000). Windows can be dragged to other monitors, but software rendering will be used.

Other operating systems

• Windows Me: 6.51.012 drivers, no problems with basic operation
• Windows XP RC2: default drivers, no problems with basic operation

Conclusion

An excellent system for standard applications, at a great price. This system will also scale easily to 6 monitors, and still use only 3 slots.

For more information, see my review of the G450 PCI. It also includes information about the Matrox PowerDesk and eDualHead utilities, which are also available for the G200 MMS.

G200 MMS

Hardware

This is a PCI card, there is no AGP version. There are several versions available, I tested the 4-monitor version with TV tuner. This card also uses heat sinks for cooling.

RAM: 32 MB, 8 MB per monitor Maximum resolution: VGA: 1920x1200x16 @ 70 Hz or 1600x1200x24 @ 85 Hz DVI: 1280x1024x24 Cost: Quad without TV: US$ 699, US$ 817 with DVI cables Quad with TV: US$ 799, US$ 918 with DVI cables

The cable shown to the left has two VGA connectors and a composite video-in connector. It plugs into one of the ports on the back of the G200 MMS. DVI cables for digital flat panels are also available, but need to be purchased separately.

Installation

There are two driver sets, one for display and one for TV/Video-in. I used the latest versions of both, 5.34.013 and 2.02.017. Installation went without problems, but the TV/Video drivers didn't work on my system, I got a KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED kernel error whenever an application tried to use them. Matrox tech support thinks it may be because of the dual CPU system, but this hasn't been confirmed. For this reason I tested the TV and video-in features on Windows 98, using the 6.24.007 (display) and 1.55.043 (video) drivers.

G200 MMS Quad on Windows 2000

Display quality

Display quality is excellent, screen refresh appeared a tad slower than on the G450 though.

Video / TV

The card has excellent video and TV features. Overlays are available on each monitor, which enables good performance and quality for video playback.

Matrox includes PC-VCR for watching TV and video-in, a screen shot from Windows 98 is shown below. The tool worked great, unfortunately only on the primary monitor. According to Matrox, this is a limitation of Windows 98, on NT 4 and Windows 2000 it should work on any monitor. Before installing the video tools on Windows 98, make sure you have a recent version of DirectX installed, it won't work otherwise.

Multimedia

Certainly not the strength of this card: DVD didn't work at all, I tried with several different players. 3D acceleration is available, but quite slow. You get OpenGL acceleration on the primary monitor, and software rendering on the others.

Other operating systems

• Windows 98: worked fine using the drivers mentioned above. Windows Me drivers aren't available yet
• Windows XP RC2: worked fine using the default drivers. XP even installed a Matrox WDM video capture driver, but this didn't work

Conclusion

An excellent card for special uses, with impressive TV/Video-in features. But for general-purpose use, the G450 combo is probably preferable.

Advantages of the G200 MMS over the G450 combo:

• support for digital flat panels
• excellent video features, with overlays on every monitor and TV/Video-in
• uses only a single slot

8 monitors

I also tried an 8-monitor system using all 3 cards, I didn't actually hook up 8 monitors though. Now that's a multi-monitor system:

G200 MMS + 2x G450 on Windows 2000

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