Review: Matrox Millennium G450 DualHead (Page 3/9)

Posted: December 8, 2000
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Corporate Strategies

If you’re still reading, you’ve obviously come to one conclusion -- Matrox is positioning the G450 at the productivity market. A lot of the times, it’s better and more rewarding to be the creator of something than to be the user of it. If you’re an artistic creator, you’ll definitely appreciate 2D acceleration. That’s right. 2D is the key word here.

In a corporate market, high resolutions and color depths are especially important for high-detail precision work such as document imaging. For imaging professionals, the “see more, do more” concept associated with high resolutions translates into greater productivity.

Supporting excellent 2D performance becomes more demanding at higher resolutions and color depths because of the amount of processing power required. In other words, a card has to work harder to sustain the same level of performance at 1600x1200 in 32-bit color than it does at 1024x768 in 16-bit color. Have you ever found yourself moving images around the screen finding that you can actually see your card redraw the image or windows? If you have “show window content while dragging” option selected in Display Properties, you can move windows around while being able to see what the contents are. While doing this you may notice the window being redrawn rapidly. If you do, you have a card that doesn’t perform 2D acceleration very well. This is where Matrox shines with the Millennium G450.

2D performance is even more important for demanding applications, such as those that require more bitmap caching. For example, Adobe Photoshop and QuarkXpress have a lot of toolbars with numerous icons that are stored as bitmaps. These require more 2D power for instantaneous refresh.

Even if you don’t work with those types of applications, you’ll definitely appreciate a sharper looking Windows. Your computer experience can be a ho-hum experience or you can actually be wowed by the crisp display your video card kicks out. Evidence of such quality appears in our review of Hercules’ 3D Prophet 2 Ultra. Why buy an ultra sharp monitor with an ultra cruddy graphics card, right? You won’t appreciate tone and sharpness in games as much as you would in Windows and this is where the G450 shows its strengths.

DualHead Technology

They say two heads are better than one. This statement couldn’t be truer with the Millennium G450.

Do you still have that old monitor around? The one you left behind with your last system thinking you'd put that system to use? Well, you can be happy because now there's actual use for a multi-monitor system

The idea of using multiple monitors on a single PC isn't new; it's been around for a while. But until recently, that idea didn't really go far. It was neither used in the office or at home for the average Joe. But with the advent of the G400 and now the G450, that idea is back with surprisingly good support.

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