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AMD on Celeron/Matrox Intros the G450
rubyred writes "AMD is at it again today and has added to their Duron line-up and released the 750MHz, which performed well against the Celerons from Intel. There are reviews on Sharky's and Anand's. Also Matrox, who we've not heard from in while has let loose a new .18micron based G450 chip, which is set for the corporate world. The 2D performance looks really good but the gaming... well it's another Matrox product. Still their Linux drivers might get better this time around. Again the same two sites have previews of the card."
Colour me odd, but by far most of my computer time is spent staring at text on the screen: word processing, graphics creation, page layout and web browsing.
My impression of Slashdot folk is that a good number of them spend most of their time coding software or creating web pages.
In other words, our machines are our tools for creating products, which we get paid for.
For all of us (with the exception of the 3D modeling folk), shouldn't our primary concern then be to obtain the absolute best *2D* card? The one that produces the sharpest, stable-est output?
By all indications, that'd be either a Matrox or an ATi card... not a card that cares more for 3D performance than 2D quality.
Just my opinion and, like I said, maybe I'm the odd one out on this sort of product choice...
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One thing that is rarely mentionned is that they have rock solid video drivers (although I haven't done 3d in linux with it). Every steroid pumping card I've used from Diamond or ATI or has _always_ had stability problems and/or poor support for none win9x platforms.
Quite frankly, after 30fps it don't make much of a diff. I play half-life(CS) in 800x600 all the time and never had probs. Not to mention that all good games always come with little g400 problems. I'm always reading faq items from people detailing various 3dfx card problems or weird behaviors. The faq sections for the g400s are always empty.
Anyways, as long as they keep up the decent 3d performance I'll be happy. The others can keep their 60fps cards and blue screens.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
I bought a Duron 600 last week for $62. I am currently running it at 1Ghz (1000Mhz)! It gets up to about 48.7C under heavy load which seems to be about average for a 1Ghz Athlon.
I have read recently that they have locked the multiplier so that it can't be unlocked even with the pencil trick, too bad for those who didn't buy one in time. 8(
On the contrary, software is going to become a greater part of the cost, at least for the people and corporations that haven't yet seen the One True Way of the GNU.
There are (not yet proven successful, but trying) business models which rely on mostly giving away the hardware at a loss, and then making it back in software and services.
Witness, iOpener.
I've been running a G400 Max for several months. 3D works great with XFree 3.3.6 and Utah GLX (I haven't tried Xfree 4.x yet.) While the 3D may be more sluggish than the newer 3D cards, the drivers are open and Matrox has traditionally been the most friendly video card company to the open source community. That counts for a lot in my book, and I plan to continue voting for them with my wallet for the foreseeable future (I'm currently investigating how well a Rainbow Runner would work with Linux.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Matrox cards seem to support dual monitors better than any other. I don't know if it has added hardware support or they provide better documentation on how to do it...
I have had three 8MB Millennium 1's in my alpha for a while. I went down to two because the third monitor's location was a pain.
If I must spend money to upgrade these M1's (one millennium is in a PC), I'll go for a G400 Max, maybe a G450. I really want to have the TV out and dual monitor capabilities. The Millennium 1 is still a great work horse video card. The 6 year old cards can knock a few AGP cards off their too lofty pedestal.
After using dual monitors, it makes using a single monitor feel very cramped.
As mentioned in this german article from Heise there are already some names (Siemens/Fujistu, Compaq and IBM) announcing sub DM 2000 (probably translates to sub $1000) PC's with this part. Since MHz still sell in the OEM business this might make some dent in Intels OEM sales and that will probably hurt more (in terms of $$, not of faceloss) than the whole 1.13 GHz story.
Another more detailed article can be found at Anandtech.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
As OSes and software is getting cheaper everyday Intel better start worring about AMD eating thier lunch. Since software will soon become a minimal cost of building computers. People will see that AMD is giving more bang for the buck.
Let me say "me too!".
:-)
I've been *extremely* happy with Matrox cards in the past.
- They support their products for a *long* time (I still get updated drivers for the old Matrox cards in my other computers!)
- Their Windows 9x drivers so far have always been rock solid, at least on my rather unusual self-built machine (unlike many other graphics card manufacturers I tried in the past).
- 2D image quality: Yes, it is indeed that good as other people here already stated. And this is one of my main concerns when working with computers. Just ask the many computer store clerks I drove insane just by the way I check a computer screen before I buy it...
- They were among the first to release specs to the XFree folks. The Matrox products used to be the fastest 2D cards on Linux and back then, it was one of the reasons why I switched.
- The G400 double head support is a *very* good thing. Sure, Macs had it for more than a decade, but you can't appreciate it unless you tried it yourself. It is also nice to play games on a TV set with the G400.
To sum up, anyone who is working with his machine most of the time and is also a casual gamer (as myself), the Matrox card is *the* one to buy.
I have played a few 3D games on it (Freespace 1 & 2, Descent 3, Halflife, Homeworld, Dungeon Keeper 2) and wasn't disappointed. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't mind better game support. If Matrox came out with a more Gamer-oriented card that still has all the "office & business" qualities mentioned above, I'd buy it!
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Does anyone know if the G450 supports hardware YUV-to-RGB conversion and scaling on BOTH the primary and secondary outputs, and if this is supported by the Xv extension under XFree86 4.0?
Also, does the dual head support appear as two X screens (as reported by xdpyinfo) under XFree?
Yes, matrox cards rock. Get their linux beta drivers (with source) from murc. Who cares about bleeding edge three-dee when it's obsolete in six months and 2d suffers (quality and speed) suffers in the meantime.
It's like vga support back in the old school. new cards like s3 had fast blitters but only with their windows 3.11 drivers. Kick down to dos to run a game, and perfomance blows (time to get a et4000 or w32).
Btw - matrox has kick ass vga _and_ vesa.. Although there are too many vesa modes to keep programmed in bios, so they are dropping the lower res ones...
The G450 is not meant to be a high-performance card. I haven't seen benchmarks yet, but performance is expected to be worse than the G400 MAX. It is also expected to be less expensive than the G400 MAX. The G450 seems to be intended for OEMs who want an inexpensive card that is not a piece of crap. This card will probably be ideal for business use, where they don't care about gaming performance but they do care about resolution, refresh rate (Hz, not FPS), image quality, and possibly dual-head.
Personally, I'm trying to hold off until the G800 appears (not sure but I think in 2-3 months). That should have performance in the same ballpark as the GeForce 2. It'll probably be supported by XF86 4.0 very soon after release too (maybe even before :).
Not to mention what all that extra heat from CPUs are doing for the greenhouse effect...
The main problem with AMD right now is that the motherboards cost so much more. The Duron/Athlon chips are cheeper but when you have to spend $50 more on the motherboard (than if you bought a PIII or a Celly) it makes the price gap very small.
When we can get Socket A mobos for $70, then Intel will be truly useless.
PS. I don't understand what the title "AMD on Celeron" is supposed to mean. I guess that they are on the celeron's trail? Weird grammar.
http://overwhelmed.org
With the demise of Number Nine, Matrox seems to be one of the only companies today who cares about 2D quality. My friend was using an S3 based card for a while, which broke, and was replaced with a G400, the improvement in picture quality was astonishing. Though he still hasn't been able to get the linux 3d support working right. But if the G450 is as good as expected, I'd be happy to own one. As far as the Durons go, I've been looking into getting a new CPU, but was going to get a Celeron2 until I found that my motherboard can't use the new .18 micron chips. Looks like a new case/mobo/cpu for me...
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
is either *very* shrewd, or downright annoying, depending on your point of view.
The Duron is targeted specifically at the Celeron, and nothing else. Until this announcement, the chip has been clocked at 700MHz, to match the Celeron. But look at the aftermarket, and I've heard reports of overclocking it to 900MHz, which makes sense, considering it's built on the same lines with Thunderbird, which is shipping 1.1GHz parts.
I presume this 750MHz announcement is meant to sway fence-sitters who look only at MHz and "Intel Inside" stickers, since even the 700MHz mopped the floor with Celeron. Duh gee, the number's bigger, so maybe it'll be faster, even though it's cheaper.
On the annoying side, AMD is clearly protecting their Thunderbird market by capping the Duron clock speed. I can appreciate this some, because L2 Cache size is a little more difficult to equate to price and performance than MHz. They're also playing the clock-locking games with Duron. Last round, people began tinkering with the lands on the substrate to unlock the clock, but I've heard that the latest production runs can't be tweaked that way. Normally I wouldn't overclock, but a 700MHz part off of a 1.1GHz line seems like it has a bit of headroom, to me.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Your point being? I've been using my G400 for gaming, and haven't run into any framerate problems. I don't personally care if a GeFore2 gets better performance. If I'm not getting slowdown, why should I want a faster card? Admittedly, it doesn't do 1600x1200 at high speeds, but then for gaming, 1024x768 is good enough for me anyway. Furthermore, not only is 2D performance really good, but the image quality is unsurpassed. Matrox just seem to be able to get really clean, crisp images to the screen.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown