Parhelia + Peltier = winning chip?

[Kevin]

Just wondering what you guys thought of that idea... it seems as though the parhelia is limited by its core clock speed. A peltier would sure help to increase that. Anyone willing to try? I'm not... just in case it doesn't get that big of an increase, then i'd be stuck w/ a $400 POS.
-Kev

[WebMasta33]

I don't know... but at Best Buy, we're selling these 17" CRTs for 99bucks (after the rebates of course).

I was thinking about getting two of them, and putting them along side my 21"....

Just a pipe dream I suspose...

...even though it'd really be good with LCDs... not CRTs....

[FRAGN'STIEN]

I just read an article on the Parhelia and it sounded like a solid performer and maybe a major comback for matrox. I can't wait to see the reviews when it hits the market.

[Cyco-Dude]

well, if you look on the frontpage of [H]ard|OCP, there are several reviews out now.

[FRAGN'STIEN]

Originally posted by Cyco-Dude
well, if you look on the frontpage of [H]ard|OCP, there are several reviews out now.

MUST--RESIST--CLICKING--LINK

[WebMasta33]

Originally posted by Cyco-Dude
well, if you look on the frontpage of [H]ard|OCP, there are several reviews out now.

Ewww.... posting dirty links... piffle.

[Brad]

you need a utility to allow you to overclock it first, which isn't out there at this stage

[jtroutma]

I happen to agree with Kevin.

I think that if we could get the Parhelia up to say 270 or even 300Mhz it might be a much better compretetor to the GF4. But the fact does remain that Matrox was not out to create a GF4 killer to begin with.

Would be tempting to freeze that mother.....even better, you only have to freeze the core becuase the memory already has almost double the bandwith as the GF4.

Now, if I only had $400 laying around my house to burn........................

[Heavy_Equipment]

Read the review at Anandtech. In my opinion, Anand has the most thorough reviews.

Anyway to paraphrase the review, this card was aimed at the graphics/professional crowd, which has been Matrox's bread and butter all along. They are apparently going to ramp up to the performance market...I imagine that they are testing the water in the 3D market as well, it's about to get pretty friggin' hot,(NV30, R300, 3DLabs/Creative, ...) so I wouldn't want to show all my cards either right now. But as Matrox admits, at the .15 micron process, they ran out of room on the die, so things had to be left out to make room for the features they wanted to push. Read it all here

I like the triple monitor idea, and the card starts to get competitive with the GF4 4200 at high resolution, but I would really like to see them do a revision on it, put a decent cooler on it, and run it at 2002 clock speeds. (it's at 220/550 MHz retail, 200/550 OEM vs. 300/650 for a GF4) The Parhelia uses 3.3ns Infineon ram...so 650 MHz DDR shouldn't be a problem, even though they say faster isn't needed. (HELLO...over-clockers here ) The Visiontek GF4 4600 uses 3.6ns Samsung with no cooling at 650 MHz.

So Kev, if there ends up being a "cool bits" type app for the matrox, I would have to think yes, another 100 MHz on the core clock, and this thing would be a contender. 200 MHz more would be way too cool. But unless someone writes an app to OC it...

[Heavy_Equipment]

Another point I wanted to add...I'd give it a month or two for them to sort out the drivers as well. How long did it take ATI to get the bugs out of the Radeon?

[gmat]

For one this card needs a price revamp. At 200$ it would be a killer.
About drivers, i've been owning Matrox cards for .. huhhhh .... 9 years now (using a G450 at work), and they never seemed to be able to produce a *full* set of OK drivers. I hope that will change...

Kevin's idea sounds good, one needs to find a way to OC that core. Wont be long.

The triple display feature is very neat indeed.

[jtroutma]

I say wait a month and most likly the people at Entech will put in the OC ability into Powerstrip...

As for OC the memory..... why?

The GF4 @ 650Mhz memory clock has about 10 Gbps where the Parhelia @550Mhz memory clock has over 18Gbps!!!! (thanks to 256bit memory instead of only 128bit on the GF4)
What is slowing the thing down is the core, not the memory.
My dibs say that you could OC the memory but you will see maybe a 1% increase in performace; just not worth it IMHO.

Now cranking up the core on that puppy, I would say returns of 25 - 35% (coupled with optimized drivers that is). That is what I am betting on.

[DarkEdge]

I'm looking forward more towards the Radeon card. There drivers are finally up to par, and so far it looks to be the top dog on paper. The matrox card had potential but the intial benchmarks aren't showing good scores for gaming. It will be interesting to see what happens and what I buy.

[Heavy_Equipment]

I've never owned a Matrox card, so I'm not defending them out of pride or anything like that, but I think the price is fair.

Look at the features, and the technology that this card has, I think it justifies the price.

I would consider this card if OC'ing it brings it on par with the big dogs...the goodies would end up giving this card the edge in that respect.

I don't usually speculate...because I've been wrong too many times, but with 2 years invested in R & D, and creating this card...I'm sure they are just teasing the market.

For all we know, they could have a 400+ MHz core ready, and are just waiting for the right time to unleash it...do it too early, and NVidia has a chance to beat it.

*edit*
Just wanted to show why I am speculating a serious ass kicker coming from them soon.

They have definately planned for bigger and better...

On the flip side of the board you'll see all of the solder pads for an extra 128MB of memory and all of the pads for the termination resistors that go along with the added memory. Matrox will be offering a higher clocked version of the Parhelia with 256MB of memory later this year

The last sentence has my attention.

Condsidering the "current" configuration of 128 MB at 550MHz can deliver 17.6 GB/s...there's no possible way that 220 MHz can digest that data that fast. Ok, a "higher clocked version", what could they possibly have up their sleeve that would need 256 MB at 17.6 GB/s????

If that faster version falls within an inch of 400 MHz, I'll be the first one to buy it, without even waiting for a review.

[jtroutma]

I wouldnt be THAT hassty

[Heavy_Equipment]

That would be so unlike me to impulse buy.

Seriously, with the right GPU on there, it'll be on the top of my list for the next card I buy. The NV30 and R300 will have to a hell of a lot more than just fast to impress me.

The fact that Creative bought 3DLabs...I consider that a major strike against the P10. I have no problem with Sound Blaster, but after 2 Creative video cards now, they'll never see any more of my money in that department.

[Heavy_Equipment]

I'm not defending them out of pride or anything like that

I'm going to take that part back...I just now, for the first time ever, realized Matrox was a Canadian company.

Now I'm proud.

[warp_zero]

I havent gotten a good Creative product in years. The two good products i got from them was a Soundblaster rev2.0 and a 4x CD-ROM drive... there more recent sound cards suck... and HATE overclocked PCI busses, and their DVD drives just plain blow.

[koslov]

Well, there better be some OC app soon, or else Matrox will have its ass handed to them when R300 debuts, and again when NV30 shows up. That's the problem with non-NVIDIA cards; hardware may be good, but it takes months for decent drivers and tweakers to come out. Same deal is gonna happen with Parhelia. So by the time Parhelia can perform to its full potential with mature drivers and OC ability, it will already be antiquated by newer ATi and NVIDIA cards.

NVIDIA has always had a rep of releasing excellent drivers when their hardware first debuts, and they have a large community to build tweaking utils for them.

As for this higher clocked Parhelia, it better be on .13m, or else there's no way its going to exceed 275. And consider, even if a 350 or 400Mhx part comes out in December, it will still be DX8, at the same time NVIDIA is releasing a DX9 part. Who wants to pay through the nose for old tech?

[Jimbo]

Anand discusses the biggest performance bottleneck of the Matrox card in the new R300 article. While the 256 bit bus can deliver a huge amount of vertex data, the triangle setup engine is not up to par with the GeForce 4 or R300 cards. I'm not sure how much overclocking the core would improve the triangle setup capability but I'm assuming it would not be anything spectacular.

[silverdagger]

i tried the peltiers and they caused more heat than they dissipated. maybe it'll work for you, i won't try again

[Kevin]

Originally posted by silverdagger
i tried the peltiers and they caused more heat than they dissipated. maybe it'll work for you, i won't try again

You did something wrong then. Of course they create more heat on the hot side, but the cold side should get very cold. You probably didn't get a high wattage one.

On another note, with nVidia's next chip looming on the Horizon and ATI's 9700 here, any overclock the Matrox can get won't make it a $400 card. Chop the price down to $250 or so and it might sell.

-Kev

[silverdagger]

the cold side was freezing, the hot side just added too much extra heat inside the case to make it worth it for me. maybe other things weren't set up right..