|
 |
| H.H.
Test System |
| Same
as it ever was... |
|
LiteOn
Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 866EB,
Abit
SE6 i815 Motherboard and Matrox Millennium
G450 Dual Head 32MB AGP, 128MB of PC133 True
CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside
Loop), IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drive
(thanks again Outside
Loop), Kenwood 72X CDROM,
Win 98SE,
DirectX 7.0a, Matrox
PowerDesk Drivers for Windows 98 Revision 6.10.004
 |
| Benchmarks
With The G450 |
| All
work and no play |
|
We
don't know what else to do here except just plunk
this chart down.
Quake
3 Time Demo Benchmarks With The Millennium G450
Sorry
folks in OpenGL we got much of the same results as
we got in a Direct 3D driven game. The gaming
side of the Matrox Millennium G450 takes a back seat
far behind its Dual Head, Multimedia and DVD
features. Again, if you are a "glass is
half full" type, your perspective here could be
that the G450 does have the capability for gaming in
32 bit color at 800X600 or less.
What
really puzzled us the most was the fact that the
G450 didn't even come close to the aging G400MAX, as
far as gaming performance goes. With a new .18
micron core, the G450 should have a much higher
clock speed, correct?
We
decided to look into this further and started up the
utility that is widely known amongst hard
core Matrox fans, MGA Tweak. This utility
should give us a look inside the G450 and its clock
speeds.
Here we
are looking at a 162MHz. reference clock that is
supplied to the SDRAM for roughly 333 MHz. DDR.
The Core Graphics clock however is rated at roughly
65MHz. This seems strange but we got the same
results from Entech's
PowerStrip as well. Our only conclusion is
that the core speed of the G450 is markedly slower
than that of its predecessor, the G400.
This
could in fact be the case and it would stand to
reason. If you are familiar with highly
integrated processor cores, often as higher levels
of integration in peripheral functions are
introduced into a processor core architecture,
timing characteristics are increasingly more
difficult to control and optimize. We will be
contacting the folks at Matrox for comment here as
well.
Well,
there you have it. This is the Matrox
Millennium G450 from start to finish. Let's
recap... First this card has fantastic Multi-Display
capabilities and an excellent offering of Multimedia
Business and Entertainment features that will be
sure to please the Wall Street types and Gadget
Freaks alike. The Dual Head output, drivers
and performance are far more mature than the
GeForce2 MX approach and the G450's level of
integration should allow for lower cost in the long
run. The current MSRP on the G450 is $145.
On the
other hand, we were really hoping to see more from
the G450 in terms of 3D performance. We don't
need to go into detail again on this but suffice it
to say that the Matrox Millennium G450 is a
"Business/Productivity/Casual Gaming
Card". If your concern is for frame rate,
the G450 is not the ticket. The forthcoming
Matrox G800 may be more your style.
We're
giving the Matrox Millennium G450 a HotHardware Heat
Meter Rating of....
| 
