Matrox Parhelia....The Final Graphics Card.

Hello and welcome to another Budget Builds Episode where today we're going to be taking a look at the Matrox Parhelia, thats right something not by AMD, ATI, Nvidia, 3DFX and the likes, no this time we're back at it looking at Matrox... But not just any Matrox card, no this time we're taking a look at the final card they managed to make, so sit back, relax, and enjoy as we take a deep dive into the history of the card and push it to its uptmost limits. With Matrox's Final Stand.

Anyways we really do push this card to its limits with the likes of Half Life 2, CS Source, Fable TLC and plenty more, with plenty of researching going into documenting the history of this card and just what happened. Enjoy :D

Simcity 3000 - Building
TY - OST
KOTOR - Pazaak and Secret Jazz
TTD and OpenTTD: OST

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Specs:
CPU: Pentium 4 Northwood @ 2.6GHz
GPU: Matrox Parhelia - 128MB AGP 4X Release Model
RAM: 2GB DDR RAM

Windows 7 Debloted and Windows XP 32Bit SP3

THIS VIDEO IS MADE AS A HOBBY AND NOT TO BE REDISTRIBUTED OR REUPLOADED

[BudgetBuildsOfficial]

0:35 - I say decade....Turns out we're all old now and I actually mean Century, so the Year 2000. Anyways enjoy!

[BReal-EC]

It makes sense that a professional PC hardware company would have issues entering the consumer market. Pro grade hardware is usually build quality/reliability/build quality focused, while *consumer* grade is usually (disposable) bang for the buck focused.(*spell corrected)

[CrazyBlueTv]

The GPU market could be intresting today if they were still around. sad

[DarkBlood]

I had this video card when it released. I made heatsinks for it, overclocked it, and ran quake 3 on triple CRT monitors back then... thanks to parhelia, I have always been a surround screen gamer. I can never go back to 1 screen. Matrox Parhelia was a legend.

[LadBooboo]

The late 90s early 00s were a wild time for pc hardware, I kinda miss those turbine looking cpu coolers thermaltake used to make

[KingKong-mpgj]

Some years ago i chatted with a matrix representative at the Expo in Hannover Germany where they had a small booth. We had a Matrox Mystique back in the nineties in my brothers first pc which powered all the fun we had back then so i was delighted to see them there. Turns out they are still going strong albeit not in the gaming market of course but in a professional niche which is ultra reliable multi-monitor 2D graphics. They have 700 employees according to wikipedia as of last year so they seem to do pretty good.

[Zku]

Nice recap of an highly anticipated card of the early 2000's! Two things, one of the main reasons for the hype that Parhelia-512 would be great for gaming was the massive bandwith it had, 17.6GB/s (Retail) which was 7.2GB/s faster than Ti4600! That was really unheard at the time! Secondly Parhelia suffered greatly with the decision Matrox made of not including any occlusion culling tech. So the card just rendered everything in scene, not able to check if an abject would be visible to the gamer. That really saturated the bandwith a lot with unnecessary data.

[rdcrezz]

You say its the only card they marketed as a gaming card, but what about the Mystique? I had one of them back in the day and that was marketed as a gaming card.

[herbasaurus]

Matrox was an interesting company to say the least

[RMDTech]

Surprising to see the features this card was packing back in its day. Really loved watching this blast from the past. RIP Matrox

[paulg]

Matrox I seem to recall made a pretty well regarded gaming card called the "Millenium". The strength of this gaming card was that unlike the Voodoo 2 or similar, Matrox were one of the first (with the card called the "All-In-One-Wonder) to combine a 2D and a 3D card on the same PCB. This may sound like an obvious thing to do now, but back in those days (I'm talking 90's) 2D and 3D cards were sold separately and used an external passthrough cable to conjoin the two cards before a final cable sent the image generated by BOTH cards to the CRT monitor. All good, or so it sounds. The down side was the cost. Most people were used to replacing just the 3D card, and had the same 2D card for years (I used an S3 Savage for quite a while, firstly with a single Voodoo 2, and latterly with a PAIR of Voodoo 2 in SLI) and the eyewatering cost of the Millenium and then the "All-In-One-Wonder" which came before it meant most people couldn't afford it.

[dollardealtech]

Still usable. Not sure why anyone would want to use it, but it works.

[tHeWasTeDYouTh]

Anyone here remember the mythical Matrox G800 that was cancelled. All we heard was rumors and I even held on buying a new GPU to wait for the
also 2:58 that is Sega GT 2002 menu music in the background. I have not thought about that game in more than 10 years!!!

[BigNerdLandon]

I really enjoy learning about more older or dare I say legacy GPU's. It's so interesting how far we came from cards like these.

[taragwendolyn]

Matrox actually got bought out by ATi shortly after the Parhelia came out. They're around in name, mostly, though their offices outside of Montreal are still there (or were last time I drove past the area). They focus mostly on large digital signage right now -- I'd be lying if I didn't say some part of me wants to buy the card with 16 DisplayPort outputs, and a whole bunch of DP 4x splitters, to see how a modern Windows or Linux OS would choke on a 48-screen display

[Trusteft]

Matrox made gaming cards before the 2000s.
Matrox Mystique series in the mid 90s. I had one then.

[jhj]

11:53 Did I hear right that he says: "...Crysis of it's day DAY it was Farc Cry"...

[evilqtip]

Yes the features were amaizing ..
The bump mapping and details And colors
made it spectacular over Nvidia soft blurry graphics.

[VGamingJunkieVT]

You and LGR have to be my favorite channels for learning about old interesting tech, cheers.

[Jonathan-fses]

9800 Pro owner here, when that card hit... it was amazing!!! Lasted far too long :) I replaced eventually with a 4870 IceQ or something.