Matrox Matrox Parhelia (Matrox-PHA128R)

WHAT'S HOT: If plugging three displays into your graphics card and immersing yourself in a game of Quake III is your idea of fun, then the Matrox Parhelia-512 is your kind of card. Of course, if you're not a gamer, you can stretch your Windows desktop across three screens and work without having to toggle back and forth between applications. Inside the box are all of the necessary cables and adapters (dual DVI connectors, a dual-VGA adapter, and a VGA-to-S-Video/composite cable) to connect them all. Matrox's PowerDesk utility provides a one-stop place to help you set up displays as well as tweak various settings. In our hands-on tests we had no problem hooking up three 15-inch LCDs.

The Parhelia-512 delivered the best overall performance in our antialiasing image-quality tests. Tested with Matrox's recommended settings (16X antialiasing and anisotropic filtering switched on), the card handled jagged edges and softened hard-edged graphics, easily outshining other cards we've tested to date.

WHAT'S NOT: Using the $399 Parhelia-512 for three-screen computing is no cheap thrill. Moreover, some games proved a bit difficult to set up. For instance, to spread Quake III over three screens we had to make manual changes to the Windows Registry and edit some Quake configuration files. Other games, such as Microsoft's Flight Simulator, required only a resolution change and were much easier to set up.

We were also unimpressed with the Parhelia-512's performance in our benchmarking tests. Overall, its speed was closer to the slower NVidia GeForce4 MX-based boards than to the faster NVidia GeForce4 Ti-based models. The card's average frame rates dropped below 60 frames per second when we ran Unreal Tournament 2003 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein at resolutions higher than 1024 by 768. (The further above 60 fps that your board can go, the less of a chance that you'll see stuttering or image-quality problems in complex scenes.) The Parhelia managed 75 fps in Unreal Tournament 2003 while running at 1024 by 768 resolution and 32-bit color. But by comparison, NVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600- and 4400-based cards were 60 fps faster on average in the same test.

Matrox's support hours are rather limited: Just 8 hours on weekdays only.

WHAT ELSE: The Parhelia-512's user's guide is brief, but sufficient, and it contains a helpful troubleshooting section organized by commonly asked questions.

Aside from the three-monitor support, this board comes with few extras. Matrox throws in color-calibration software and a Matrox Gigacolor plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, which allows you to view 10-bit color TIFF and PNG files. With 10-bit color, Matrox says you can display 1 billion colors rather than 16 million (but includes a disclaimer that PNF files may not look the best in Photoshop versions 6 and lower). Matrox also provides an interactive aquatic-themed demo CD that highlights the card's capabilities. And the card gets a slight hedge on upcoming technology with its partial support for DirectX 9.

To test image quality, a three-person panel watched demos of our test applications and observed each card's ability to render complex textures and to display colors and contrast. We saw little difference in image quality between this high-end model and the value cards.

UPSHOT: This card's three-screen support offers an elegant solution to a limited faction of PC users, but it's too expensive for the average graphics board buyer.

SUMMARY

Matrox Parhelia-512 Matrox Parhelia chip, 128MB of DDR SDRAM, 350-MHz RAMDAC, DVI-out, tri-display support, S-Video-out, composite-out; Matrox PowerDesk utility suite, color-calibration software, Matrox Gigacolor plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. $399 800/361-1408 www.matrox.com/mga