Keep or ditch my Matrox P750?

[Teffy]

I want to build a new, fast and quiet PC for surfing, office apps, and Photoshop Elements. I have a Matrox Millenium P750 triple-monitor video card, and I can’t decide whether or not to use it in a new system. I love it for driving my two 19in. CRTs, but it has a noisy fan and it is an AGP card.

AGP:
I have no interest in gaming, ever. What are the odds that I’ll be sorry later if I go now with an AGP motherboard? Is it feasible to move a CPU to a new board later?

Noisy fan:
The P750 has eight months left on its three year warranty – but I am willing to try replacing the fan despite voiding the warranty. I get a bit discouraged though, when I read about solutions like the Ninja taking up so much room (and being so heavy).

Ditch the P750:
I don’t know if I will never want to use a third monitor with it. Perhaps I should go with a new, quiet, PCIe dual-monitor card, if I can find one that won’t make me sacrificed text quality.

Can you please help me figure out which way to go?

Thanks,
Teffy

[rei]

I'd ditch it. Matrox has LONG abandoned the end user market and can't be counted on for support. Current cards are also crazy-overpriced for obsolete pieces of junk. I used to be a Matrox fanboy and I'm pretty realistic now.

Get a nice lifetime warranty eVGA/XFX NVIDIA card or an ATI card though I'm not sure any equivalent ATI manufacturers have visible "lifetime warranty" policies aside from the standard "hard-as-hell-to-RMA-back-to-Taiwan-on-your-own-coin warranty."

Get a nice inexpensive (<$150) dual DVI 6600GT/7600GS/X1600.

[Teffy]

Get a nice inexpensive (<$150) dual DVI 6600GT/7600GS/X1600.

Do they give text as crisp as Matrox?

Thanks,
Teffy

[rei]

Yes, the days of Matrox claiming superiority in 2D are long gone. I remember 2D on my Geforce2 MX, Geforce 3 cards being brutal but DVI is quite nice on my 6600GT/7800GT/X800XL.

[rei]

heck...you could go <$100 to go with NVIDIA 7300, ATI X1300 cards if you don't do any gaming at all. you -sure- you don't play anything?

[Elixer]

If your new setup is going to have an AGP slot, and your current video card meets all of your needs, then why would you think of upgrading? When Vista rolls around you may want to upgrade, but you might as well save your money and wait until then. I say rig a quiet fan on the thing, or if you're brave just unplug the fan and run the card passive. Many older, low power cards have no problem doing this.

[mbetea]

I used to be a fan of Matrox. Had the 450, 550 and the 650. In between those I did try ATI and Nvidia cards. My experience is if you're sticking with CRT monitors, Matrox does give a higher quality image. When the 6800 series first came out I got a 6800nu to drive 2 high quality NEC 19" CRT monitors. I was disappointed with the results. Text was blurry and any fine lines or details were also compromised. Thinking maybe I had 2 bad monitors (unlikely) I tried a couple other monitors I had around, same thing.

But, for running LCDs my experience has been the opposite. I tried using the P650 to run 2x 21" Samsung 213T monitors. It should definitely support 2 displays at 1600x1200 res. but whichever monitor was hooked up to the second DVI port, the picture was muddy and had almost the same performance as the 6800nu had with CRTs. After that I quickly picked up a 6800gt and the displays have been great.

So the way I look at it is Matrox for CRT and ATI/Nvidia for LCDs.

[IsaacKuo]

I'd try removing the fan and rigging up an 80mm fan to blow at the heatsink (undervolted to 5v). Also, you can get this dirt cheap 16MB Matrox Millennium G450 Dual Head AGP4x just in case you need it.

[Shining Arcanine]

I want to build a new, fast and quiet PC for surfing, office apps, and Photoshop Elements. I have a Matrox Millenium P750 triple-monitor video card, and I can’t decide whether or not to use it in a new system. I love it for driving my two 19in. CRTs, but it has a noisy fan and it is an AGP card.

AGP:
I have no interest in gaming, ever. What are the odds that I’ll be sorry later if I go now with an AGP motherboard? Is it feasible to move a CPU to a new board later?

Noisy fan:
The P750 has eight months left on its three year warranty – but I am willing to try replacing the fan despite voiding the warranty. I get a bit discouraged though, when I read about solutions like the Ninja taking up so much room (and being so heavy).

Ditch the P750:
I don’t know if I will never want to use a third monitor with it. Perhaps I should go with a new, quiet, PCIe dual-monitor card, if I can find one that won’t make me sacrificed text quality.

Can you please help me figure out which way to go?

Thanks,
Teffy

There are some AGP motherboards with 775 sockets. You could probably go with one of those.

If I was you, I would keep the Matrox card. From everything I have heard, you will not find a card with better 2D quality on the market.

[rei]

the man said he wants to build a new system.

for the love of pete, you can't reuse the hoary old matrox in the new system.

[Thomas]

I've never used a Matrox, so I cant comment on that. But with my ATI 9800, I find it works great with text in 2D mode, both with Windows XP, and in DOS. At least with a CRT, my new TFT aint as good in DOS mode. However, I havent tried calibrating it yet.

Last sping, I bought a Socket A based system, because it fitted my needs performance wise, and the price was of course lower than the newer CPU-standards. However, I've actually regretted it, because now I'm limited to AGP VGA cards. And there's a couple of new passive cards, which attracts me now.

[MikeC]

Matrox on 2D & CRT is unbeatable. With LCD, the advantage is gone today. I have not seen any disadvantage using my Matrox 650 w/ LCDs. Also, AFAIK, newer cards don't go any faster for non-3D, so there's not much incentive to change if you don't need 3D & still want to run 3-monitors.

[qviri]

What Mike said. I have a passive G450 and I'm loving it. I agree that something will have to be done about the fan, but with Matrox's heat consumption, it shouldn't be overly hard. See this thread where a member is running an unspecified Parhelia passive with a little enhancement to the heatsink.

I am outraged at the suggestions to buy a new $100 or $150 card just because the Matrox is a "hoary old" card. The original poster said outright I have no interest in gaming, ever. How can you recommend an upgrade in this situation? Is $100 pocket change for you guys?

Oh, for the member who said Matrox abandoned the end user market... Isn't it funny that I was able to download drivers for my probably four-year card off their website with no problem whatsoever?

[Teffy]

Thanks for the great discussion!

If I stick with the Matrox/CRT combo, that means I buy a mobo with AGP for the new system. What are the odds that I’ll be sorry later without PCIe? I'm not interested in games - really!

Is it feasible to move a CPU to a new mobo with PCIe later? I'm leaning toward the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800, socket 939.

Teffy

[qviri]

You can certainly upgrade the motherboard later. However, since you're going for 939 anyway, you may be interested in the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2. It's a motherboard with both AGP and PCI-E that has reasonably good opinions around SPCR -- do a search if you're interested.

[DiMension]

I'm currently running a PCIe system, but I have experience with a P650. I recently bought an XFX GeForce 6600 with dual DVI and passive cooling to replace the noisy P650 (PCIe). I'm using DVI to drive my flatpanel, and it doesn't make any difference in image quality. Also, the nVidia driver is much better. I use pivot mode a lot, and nVidia doesn't let me click through three windows before I can rotate the image.

I sold my Matrox P650 for more than the 6600 cost me, and with the 6600 I can finaly start doing some 3D modeling. Matrox used to be cool in the days of the G450, but nowadays there's no reason to stay with them. I'd try to sell the P750 and get a decent passive cooled PCIe card, if I were you. That shouldn't set you back quality-wise, and makes your setup a lot more future-proof.

[Teffy]

You can certainly upgrade the motherboard later. However, since you're going for 939 anyway, you may be interested in the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2.

Whoa. I never knew such a critter existed! Maybe I can have my cake and eat it, too!

Thanks,
Teffy

[rei]

please avoid hybrids, they're way more trouble than they're worth.

[Thomas]

A few things, I think should be considered:

* What if your Matrox card blew up one day? Then you're forced to choose a AGP card, unless you go with the AsRock hybryd mobo.
* If you keep the Matrox, how will you cool it? I'm thinking of the price of a cooler, compared to a new VGA card.
* A new VGA, which is standard mounted with a passive cooler, is covered by warranty.
* What's your requirement for a mobo? Is there a PCIe mobo, which suits you better than the best AGP you can find?

Personally, I dont got experience with AsRock. But I know a couple of guys, which wont buy AsRock again. But then again, one can always find examples.

[hmsrolst]

Matrox on 2D & CRT is unbeatable. With LCD, the advantage is gone today. I have not seen any disadvantage using my Matrox 650 w/ LCDs. Also, AFAIK, newer cards don't go any faster for non-3D, so there's not much incentive to change if you don't need 3D & still want to run 3-monitors.

Since recent posters have focused on the viewing quality of non-Matrox cards, I thought I'd repeat Mike's post. If you're going to continue to use CRT's, and thus analogue connections, the experience of those using LCD's and digital connections might not be that relevant to your situation.

[Landroval]

If you're using two or three displays, then Matrox is still the strongest performer. Multimonitor support of ATI and Nvidia are still not on par with Matrox. Also the Matrox drivers are much lighter than Catalyst or Forceware and they use much less system resources. I still have a G400 on my secondary system, and it's doing it's job just as it should. The newer ATI cards I've had and have need much more attention from the user.

[qviri]

Matrox on 2D & CRT is unbeatable. With LCD, the advantage is gone today. I have not seen any disadvantage using my Matrox 650 w/ LCDs. Also, AFAIK, newer cards don't go any faster for non-3D, so there's not much incentive to change if you don't need 3D & still want to run 3-monitors.

Since recent posters have focused on the viewing quality of non-Matrox cards, I thought I'd repeat Mike's post. If you're going to continue to use CRT's, and thus analogue connections, the experience of those using LCD's and digital connections might not be that relevant to your situation.

I'd also note that a lot of low- and mid-range LCDs still sold today only feature analogue D-SUB connections.

Why manufacturers treat something that actually makes displaying an image easier as a premium feature is still lost to me...