Digital Trends

Matrox Parhelia 128mb March 6th, 2003 | by Brian Clark

Setup and Installation

We installed the Parhelia in a workstation type machine. This is a machine that a professional might buy to supply themselves or to add to a small design studio. Our Test machine is using a motherboard that is a SIS wonderland of onboard integration. It has onboard video, sound, and Ethernet. The test machine is also sporting an Athlon 2200 w/ 1 GB of DDR Ram and pair of 100GB Western Digital Drives in a standard mirror configuration. While the test machine is certainly not a speed demon, we figured if we started with the least powered machine, and saw the improvement the Parhelia card made to this machine, it would be a fair indication of how the Parhelia would truly help the professional who is looking to see the $400USD retail price can be justified.

Installing the Parhelia is basic and just like any other video card. Our recommendation would be to download the latest drivers before actually inserting the card into your machine. The drivers included on the CD are premature and may cause some problems with uncommon programs. The latest drivers from Matrox fix any problems you may have. As of this review there is only driver support for both Windows XP and Windows 2000 although we have been told by Matrox that there will be support for Linux. The software package includes DVD theatre software and Matrox's well known Powerdesk software package which gives you desktop configuration tools. We did not like the fact that you have to download about 20 Megs of Microsoft's .Net software; those on dial-up will be burdened by this big time and we also question why .NET is really necessary to use this video card. Make sure you have proper cooling in your computer before installing the Parhelia. We found that the Parhelia raised our computer temperature more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Parhelia comes with two digital outputs. With Adapters we plugged one 17-inch Trinitron monitor into the top spot and with the supplied dongle; we plugged in two more 17 inch Trinitron monitors. The experience was incredible. First off, the card is able to handle the load of the three monitors with ease. There was not a single problem running three monitors at 1280x1024 64bit color. This is ultimately a high resolution and probably not a standard one on most people's workstation, but we wanted a true test of ability. Plus a graphics professional is likely to run at a high resolution. If nothing else, just so they can get all the useful windows open in an Adobe application at once. We brought over an architect and AutoCAD expert in to do the AutoCAD work. He had a native DWG file of a 6000 SQFT house he was working on. With the very high performance standard and triple head display, He was able to view the detailed front and rear elevations on separate monitors plus with the third monitor he kept a zoomed out view of the front elevation of the house. AutoCAD worked seamlessly and the display stayed sharp and crisp.