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Questions about the Parhelia

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  • Questions about the Parhelia

    I've got a few questions about the Parhelia, but first a summary of my current setup:

    P-III 750 MHz
    440BX Motherboard
    256 MB PC100 RAM
    Matrox G450 driving the following:
    17" NEC MultiSync FE750 Flatscreen CRT
    27" Zenith TV (with S-Video In )
    Hercules Game Theater XP (driving a 500 Watt Pioneer 5.1 receiver though an optical cable... analog sound output splits up to going to the receiver and to some cheap computer speakers... Actually, the S-Video from the G450 goes into this too, then the TV and a SVHS VCR...)
    The other usual stuff... (2 HDs, DVD, CDRW, Printer, Beer Fridge...)
    Oh yeah: I'm dual booting Windows 98SE and Windows 2000

    I currently use this computer as a multimedia center (DVDs, MP3s, AVIs etc). I really don't do much gaming on this system anymore, I usually use my Girlfriend's computer that I built (after scarfing the Geforce 2 GTS from my system) for her to do that. I currently use Clone mode and DVDMax to watch DVDs and other movies, and I love it for that. Now, on to 20 questions about the Parhelia: (O.K.... maybe not quite that many...)

    1) I have another 17" monitor (A Gateway 720VX flatscreen CRT) just lying around. Would I be able to connect 2 monitors and the TV to the Parhelia. Would I be able to do Dual-Head and DVD-Max at the same time? This would be ideal. Also, would I be able to have the TV clone the primary monitor? This would be a nice bonus. I will be able to live with having to switch between Single monitor + TV-clone mode and Dual-Head with no TV-clone mode. I will probably be doing a lot of Macromedia Director work on this system in the near future (possibly with other development work further down the road) and having Dual-head would make this much easier. I haven't found any definite answer on this or on the Matrox sites. This is rather critical for me, because if the answer to this is no, then I might as well just stick with the G450.

    2) The games I'm playing right now are NHL 2002, Morrowind, and Neverwinter Nights. Now NHL 2002 plays fairly well on my system, Morrowind is acceptable, but NWN was almost unplayable. I know (I think I know, at least) that NWN is unplayable on the Parhelia, (and by the time I get the P, a new driver or patch will probably be out that will fix this... hopefully). I'm pretty sure NHL2002 will be fine, but how is Morrowind? How would new games play on my system? This is really the least important of my questions, cause I could always go to my girlfriend's house that's 5 minutes away to play these.

    Well, there's my 20/10 questions. To summarize:

    1) How will 2 CRT monitors + TV-out work?

    2) How will games play on my system (PIII 750, 256Megs)

    BTW, I know that Windows 98 support is lacking (nil), but I hardly go into that ancient O.S. anymore. It would be (very) nice if Matrox would release drivers for win98 at some point (so I can play some old games that refuse to work under Windows 2000), but it isn't critical.

    Thanks for reading (suffering?) through this extended, long-winded, repetitive and redundant post...

    Zitch

    P.S. I'd also rather not get another PCI video card to do this either, in that I'm rather lacking in PCI card space as it is...

  • #2
    I think the Parhelia only supports TV out in Dualhead mode only.
    Why is it called tourist season, if we can't shoot at them?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by GT98
      I think the Parhelia only supports TV out in Dualhead mode only.
      Ah.... Now that I look into the user manual again, DVDMax is fully called "Dualhead DVDMax"...

      Ah well... That kindof sucks. Still, I might actually go for it anyways. I would like a dual monitors at work, and since my boss doesn't seem to realize how useful this would be to a developer and won't put a PCI card into the budget to go along with the agp card I have in the system there, I could buy the P for home and bring the G450 to work, as we do have a surpluss of monitors.

      Thanks for the heads up,

      Zitch

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