Matrox outsourcing chips now?

[The Rock]

http://www.reactorcritical.com is reporting that Infomagic is building video cards based on the G450 chip. Looks like the big M has decided to follow Nvidia and now ATIs lead.

Bart

[GinoCyber]

Didn't they do that with Gigabyte a while back?

[The Rock]

Oh yeah, those freaky BIOS-less video cards that had to be used in a Gigabyte board. Forgot about those. DOH!

Bart

[orangejulius]

Blurb from ReactorCritical, just in case they take it down:

It seems that not only ATI and NVidia sell their graphics processors to the third party Chinese/Taiwanese vendors. Matrox, a company that has been manufacturing graphics boards based on their own chipsets for ages, apparently started to sell their chips to the third-party.

<http://www.reactor.ru/news/november/g450_infomagic.jpg>

As we see from the picture, not very well-known company called infoMagic has started to sell their boards powered by Matrox G450. The ca
rds are equipped with 32 MB of 64-bit DDR SDRAM, 2 VGA connectors and a TV-Out. The adapter costs about ¥9800 or $80, what is rather low price for DualHead videocard from Matrox. For instance, an ordinary Millenium G450 from Matrox costs $135 in their online shop.

We would like to point out that this is not the first case when Matrox sold their graphics chips to the other vendors. For example, GigaByte used to manufacture boards powered by Matrox solutions, however, those cards were not very popular as they were quite hard to find. It may happen that this time we are going to have the same situation: a small vendor produces a small number of the boards for Asian market only.

edit: removed attached img to save MURC's bandwidth

[GinoCyber]

'however, those cards were not very popular as they were quite hard to find. '

It was a G400 on the motherboard, not a card.

[orangejulius]

If I'm not mistaken, GigaByte integrated the VGA BIOS into the mainboard BIOS.

This doesn't mean there wasn't a card.

[Tempest]

Originally posted by orangejulius
This doesn't mean there wasn't a card.

Nice

Signal degradation, in higher desktop resolutions(1600x1200) you'll notice that signal output is far from good, I use a Sony 19" 420 GS monitor for the best quality but will not use it at 1600x1200 anymore with the MG400.

So here we see "the nVidia effect". If Matrox continues to let other manufacturers use their design then they better take care that they use quality components. Good picture quality is the only (constantly diminishing) advantage that M's got, but this advantage is gone with 3rd-party cards.

[The Rock]

UPDATE: The mad Russians just posted this:

The information we posted yesterday, regarding Matrox and their cards in Japan that are sold in a different box has caused a lot of talks. As the mentioned Canadian company only produces its boards by their own, we were quite surprised that they have decided to sell their graphics chips to third party. Although GigaByte used to manufacture boards powered by Matrox graphics processors, those cards were quite hard to find, since GigaByte sold them with their own motherboards only to OEM partners. Those videoadapters did not have its own BIOS and did not work on a motherboard from a different vendor.

Talking about the boards we mentioned, they, are in fact, made by Matrox. We should explain that according to a reader, we can find two versions of Matrox's graphic cards in Japan:
Japanized product by a distributor called InfoMagic. This company supplies the cards in their own boxes, with all the manuals translated to Japanese.
Ordinary version of the graphics cards imported either by official distributors or small retailers.
Basically, InfoMagic can be called an OEM partner, however, we should mention that they do not manufacture the boards by their own. Just sell them in the appropriate package and, this time, without TV-Out cable and software DVD player.

Bart

[Ant]

Actually there is a third party card using the G450 chip that was released some months ago, it is the <a href="http://www.bigmonitors.com/products/graphics_controllers/imageaccel_4plus.htm">Cornerstone ImageAccel 4 PLUS</a>.

[Sasq]

Strangely enough I've never seen an Infomagic Dual head card here. Lots of Matrox products where ever I go. Most of the systems Engineers I deal with know and love M products. Of course the're also not into Quake

Dan

[GinoCyber]

I'm talking about the integrated G400 chip on the gigabyte motherboard.

'So here we see "the nVidia effect". If Matrox continues to let other manufacturers use their design then they better take care that they use quality components. '

Somehow I doubt it they'll enforce that. Chip vendors usually supply a reference board to their client and then it's upto the client to make it good, or crap.

[Ashley]

Matrox chips have always been available and more or less actively promoted to Asian graphics board manufacturers, but no one's really interested - for obvious reasons.

The chips themselves aren't really competitive in terms of price and performance, and boards based on the chips would have to compete against, well... boards from Matrox.