Matrox Parhelia Triple Screen Surround Gaming from 2002

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[BEXYSPC]

Use to love matrox during the 90s :) I remember how cool the triple monitor option sounded, and in 1996 my parents bought a PC with a millennium so I followed matrox but never bought another one, I do however still have the millennium my parents bought back in 1996 :)

[PixelPipes]

I've always wanted to cover this card! I'm glad you tested Serious Sam: SE as that's one of the few games that can take advantage of the quad-texturing architecture of the chip.

[hindel]

Every time I watch your videos I wish I had a time machine.. So I can send these to myself in the past =)

[MunkeyChips]

I love watching this stuff. It's unfortunate I missed out on this stuff growing up. My interests were elsewhere at the time.

[rebeccaschade]

I have a Parhelia in my Tualatin 1.4GHz system. It's a really cool card, despite the somewhat lackluster performance. The big problem, was that Matrox was primarily catering to the professional market segment, and because of this, they often focused on developing new clever technology and delivering long term product support, rather than focusing on pure performance. It is very hard to deliver both a professional product for broadcast, medical and control system usage, that also works well as a high end gaming card. Especially if you need to deliver it at consumer level prices. In the end, Matrox decided to pull out of the consumer market, and stopped producing their own GPUs altogether, but they are still creating products for use in many different professional market segments.

[balthron]

I was a huge Matrox fan back in those days. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

[samthemultimediaman]

I had a overclocked Matrox G400 Millennium Dual-head back in the day and I always wanted to upgrade to a Parhelia for the triple monitors but the card was very pricey so i never did, Matrox is still around though and still making unique video cards and other things.

[paolol.]

The precursor to AMD Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround.

[HappyBeezerStudios]

So a 15 year old card that supports surround gaming, ultrawide resolutions and HDR.
Why does it took the other companies so long to get that out to the consumer mass market.

[abagfchips]

I have a Mattrox card in my PIII 333mhz machine and the VGA output is incredible. It honestly blew me away. I've only ever known VGA to be a fuzzy mess on these modern machines.

[HoldandModify]

Best era of, "have your cake and eat it too, " Matrox Millennium with its insanely crisp VGA output for my "pro" 2D/3D app needs an then a Voodoo2 for gaming. What a thing it was!

[Storm_.]

Brilliant review of such a rare and unique card, love the comparisons!

[rcarkk]

As i said. This channel is gold! Awesome reviews..

[DanielCristofer]

Although Matrox graphics cards are popular in older gaming computer configurations, Matrox is primarily for business and CAD applications. It would be interesting to try commercial applications tests compared to Quadro FX 2000.

[jameslewis]

Those screens of X2: The Threat just brought back memories. To me it is still the best game in that series. To be honest I would have thought that this card would struggle with that game but I guess I am just forgetting how long ago it was.

[maxmoko]

Ah the long awaited video, thanks Phil!

[osgrov]

Very nice review, cheers!
The Parhelia is the only Matrox card I've never played with. Looks cool though, I may need to hunt one down.
Massive kudos for the comparison screens where you flip between the three cards so we can see the visual quality! That's impressive reviewing and most helpful. :)

[jeremyjohnson]

The Zalman clone HSF on yout Ti4600 brings back some great memories. That design, particularly Zalman's full copper version (vs your aluminum type), was truly exceptional and provided seriously excellent heat dissipation.

[antwanarmstrong]

Phil it looks like you have the refreshed parhaila card, that can overclock to 300mhz. That was the speed matrax wanted the card to operate at.

[starlightrevenant]

Nice video, I didn't knew older graphics cards can do triple screen support (which modern cards do nowadays.) I remember a graphics card that looks similar to the Radeon 9700 Pro (the red one), because one time I used to have a stock of surplus graphics cards.