Matrox

[Bozo]

Has anyone used a Matrox video card recently? Years ago I had one and the video quality was great. Matrox has cards for under $300.00 but I was wondering if their graphics was still top notch. (not for gaming)

Most of their cards have no cooling fans. Quiet!

 

[CougTek]

The last Matrox card I've played with was a Triple-Head-to-Go, but it was connected to smallish 8" 1024x768 screens, so I could not judge the quality of the image. That's probably not the product you're looking for either. Drivers caused headaches to. It was the analog edition and the graphic utility constantly asked to plug the DVI connector. That wasn't the plug and forget experience I had in the past with Matrox products.

Other than that, I haven't touch any Matrox product since they launched the Parhelia series some ten years ago.

AMD's Firepro are fine if you look at competitive products.

 

[blakerwry]

Matrox gfx chipsets (g200ew) are used in Dell servers. They work... nothing fancy.

Back in the day, Matrox was known for top notch image 2D/non-accelerated quality (image crispness). This came from the use of decent quality, accurately/realistically/reasonably spec'd DACs in the VGA output ports. Nvidia and ATi finally caught on to this in the early 2000's and came out with cards with similar quality around the Geforce line.

This is all pretty moot now, because if we cared about image quality we'd be using DVI, DP, or HDMI, none of which suffer from the Digital to Analog Conversion problems that VGA does.

Bottom line, I wouldn't even consider Matrox for anything but servers or special use applications now. Get a fanless ATi or Nvidia instead. They're cheaper, perform better, and should offer the same image quality(probably better in 3D/accelerated content).

 

[MaxBurn]

The onboard KVM/IP on my super micro board has a matrox something to do that part.