Digital Trends

Matrox Millennium P750 July 3rd, 2003 | by Doug Hall

Aside from our gaming addictions and youthful exuberance, there is a serious business side to us here at Designtechnica which involves writing and keeping up with the business end of things. For example, this review is being written while there are 2 databases open as well as Microsoft's Outlook and Word, which is being used for the sake of writing this review now. In the past we have often relied upon the awesome game rigs to provide us with the power to fullfill our multitasking demand, but at the expense of performance because of all the other installed and otherwise needless programs that consume the massive quantities of CPU time running in the background. Long have we contemplated the need for a separate workstation that has the power and flexibility that you can get out of a gaming rig with out killing the bean counters at corporate with the price tag, or doing without the serious power and flexibility that we need in order to get the written word out the door and onto your screen. Not to mention a spare rig for the occasional all night LAN game.

The Matrox P750 card itself has an MSRP of $235. Not exactly pocket change compared to some lower-end "Gaming cards", it is certainly a little pricey. But anyone who has priced a Matrox card in the Parhelia line recently will tell you that it is less than half the price of the Parhelia and a fraction of some high-end video editing solutions. From a business stand point, productivity is the name of the game and switching from database to Outlook to database to Word was getting a little old. Not to mention the efficiency lag of managing all those windows on one monitor. This baby does two DVI Monitors or three analog monitors in every conceivable configuration. Other graphic card makers have built-in multi display support and similar features too. The difference is the quality at which the graphics are displayed. On a graphics workstation it is most important of all. 2D graphics are crisp and clear and the 10-bit gamma correctable DACs are comparable to the same unit in your HDTV. Quality man! The dual 400 Mhz RAMDAC keep things chugging along beautifully.

 

Most high end 3D gaming graphics are designed to be fast; not so much quality as quantity. Super bandwidth and frame rate is the order of the day. So what do you do if you need the quality to exceed the quantity? I have often wondered about whether the frag to image ratio might be improved a bit. Soon perhaps, but not today.