Product: Matrox Millennium G450
Company: Matrox
Website: http://www.matrox.com
Estimated Street Price: $149
Review By: Julien JAY

Introduction

Matrox makes its come back by releasing the new G450 series of board. This card uses in fact a streamlined version of the successful Matrox G400 chip. Let's say things clearly: this new Matrox Millennium G450 board isn't designed for hard core gamers. Indeed Matrox now targets the Office and Small Business market and as a matter of fact the G450 3D features can't rival with the ones of GeForce 2 Ultra (see our test) or 3DFX Voodoo 5500. However the G450 comes with all the 3D features that made the success of its predecessor the G400 Max and surpasses it with its new enhanced DualHead features.

Features List

• AGP 1X, 2X, 4X

• Support for OpenGL and DirectX

• 256-bit DualBus

• DualHead Display

• Vibrant Color Quality˛ rendering

• Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping

• UltraSharp DAC

• Integrated TV encoder

• High-quality DVD playback

Setup

Installing this new card is a breeze and takes only a few minutes. The longest thing is to find how to open your PC box! You must have an AGP slot to connect it. Obviously the card is fully compliant with AGP 4x but can also works on AGP 2x ports. Once you’ve replaced the old video card by this new one, you can remount your PC box and start it. Windows will detect the new card and you’ll be prompted to install the drivers.

What’s new?

Compared to the G400 Max card the Matrox Millennium G450 offers the following improvements:

• 64 bits DDR SDRam of 32Mo clocked at 200Mhz

• G450 processor clocked at 125MHz

• G450 processor engraved at 0.18µ

• 360MHz RAMDAC

Matrox has also built in the core processor a secondary 250MHz RAMDAC that is in charge of managing the second screen with a maximum resolution up to 1600 * 1200 pixels (on the G400 the resolution was only 1280 * 1024). If we look to the refresh rates there are no differences compared to the G450 except in high resolution (1920*1440 & 2048*1536) where the refresh rate are higher providing a better image quality.

2D/3D Resolutions and Color

Maximum Refresh Rates

First Look

The Millennium G450 is a small sized 3D graphic card. This is surely due to the fact Matrox tries to reduce costs to lower the TCO. The G450 processor is protected by an heatsink with no fan, since it doesn't heat too much it's sufficient. The heatsink is linked to the card with an orange cable to remove noises that can appear on analogical outputs. The total DDR SDRAM of 32MB is composed of 4 chips of 8MB.

The Matrox Millennium G450 card