lo-profile P650 PCI / G550 PCI

[lAmerZ]

These are nice for office-PCs (book-sized).

[Whirl-Secret]

Yeah but that P650 has a fan on it, unlike the regular P650.

Also as an IT Manager for a medium-sized company, I really struggle to justify getting Matrox products. Any new computers we get would be HPs or Dells that come with acceptable onboard gfx (acceptable for word processing and database / spreadsheet work)... crazy to put up the price by getting a Matrox for people who really would not notice the difference.

Case in point: My co-worker's AGP 1.0 Voodoo3 3000 just blew up last week. She was terrified she had lost everything, and to get it up quickly I took the PCI card from my PC which happens to be a Matrox Mystique 220, and stuck it in a PCI slot.

Immediately I noticed a way better quality on the desktop - icons, clarity etc, and tried to point it out to her. She couldn't see any difference, and when I got a Radeon 7000 to replace the broken card, she demanded to have that because she said printing was taking longer from Publisher. (I have no clue about that, maybe the preview or something would take longer to load - doesn't even matter).

So in went the PCI Radeon (too tricky to try and find a AGP 1.0 card these days that will be guarenteed to work imho) and down slightly went the IQ, but she was very happy - of course the Radeon with 32Mb is quicker than the Mystique with 2Mb!

I do some Photoshop work there too and we have a Duron 1.4, again with Onboard gfx. Sure it isn't great but it _works_... to spend money on a P650 would be a waste in the eyes of the accountant. That would be half the price of a new TFT for them...

____________

So I'm basically wondering how other IT managers could justify a Matrox for desktop users who don't care about colour correction, Photoshop clarity, or even anything except MSOffice and Hotmail... because I can't I'm not saying it cannot be done, but am just wondering who would buy these products for any other reason than filling a budget or being a fanboy?