Watch out for the cracked inductor (not capacitor)!

Got it up and working. Cool little card. Great price.

Do you get playable fps in anything but ancient games? I remember vividly the disappointment when the Parhelia came out. It couldn't even compete with the previous generation cards from the competitors, at least not in terms of pure performance. I almost felt like crying, as a hardcore Matrox fan. I'd been hoping Matrox would finally be back with something that would be as good as the stuff from ATI and Nvidia, but alas 🙁
I have to admit though, that I didn't buyout the auction you seem to have gone for, due to the dodgy inductor. Always a bit worrying.
I did buy a different Parhelia though, just without the triple head cables, as I don't think I'll ever need that. 😁
Wanna use it for a P4 system based on old parts I've got.

A full-on Parhelia 512 is about the speed of a midrange GF4 TI and has the same features essentially. It's going to struggle pushing 3 screens at 2400x600 or so in even 2002-3 games.

Here's a DVI capture of me running UT2003 on one at 1024x768, including FPS stats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrV6eAPdMlA

LunarG wrote:

Do you get playable fps in anything but ancient games? I remember vividly the disappointment when the Parhelia came out. It coul […]
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Do you get playable fps in anything but ancient games? I remember vividly the disappointment when the Parhelia came out. It couldn't even compete with the previous generation cards from the competitors, at least not in terms of pure performance. I almost felt like crying, as a hardcore Matrox fan. I'd been hoping Matrox would finally be back with something that would be as good as the stuff from ATI and Nvidia, but alas 🙁
I have to admit though, that I didn't buyout the auction you seem to have gone for, due to the dodgy inductor. Always a bit worrying.
I did buy a different Parhelia though, just without the triple head cables, as I don't think I'll ever need that. 😁
Wanna use it for a P4 system based on old parts I've got.

I figured at the price it was worth a shot.

Did you post a photo of it? Does it have the shrill screamer fan that my original Parhelia has?

swaaye wrote:

A full-on Parhelia 512 is about the speed of a midrange GF4 TI and has the same features essentially. It's going to struggle pushing 3 screens at 2400x600 or so in even 2002-3 games.

Here's a DVI capture of me running UT2003 on one at 1024x768, including FPS stats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrV6eAPdMlA

Hmmm, I had a GeForce4 Ti4400 O/C at the time when the Parhelia was released (and I'd had it for a little while) and according to the reviews I read back in the days (Tom's Hardware Guide, Anandtech and so on) the Parhelia usually couldn't really compete with the GeForce 4 series. A fact that did break my heart a bit, as back then, Matrox was the holy grail of graphics card makers (in my mind).
It doesn't take away from the "cool" factor that Matrox had though. I do intend to have Matrox cards in all my retro rigs. 😉

A UT2003 Benchmark:

UT2003 Build UT2003_Build_[2002-09-19_17.26]
Windows XP 5.1 (Build: 2600)
AuthenticAMD PentiumPro-class processor @ 2213 MHz with 1023MB RAM
Matrox Parhelia 128MB (2327)

ctf-citadel?game=engine.gameinfo exec=..\Benchmark\Stuff\flybyexec.txt -benchmark -seconds=77 -nosound

11.702616 / 34.484043 / 226.843155 fps rand[1316]
Score = 34.506786

rodimus80 - Is your card unbearably loud? Mine is extremely whiny, so much so, that I'm going to have to custom build quiet cooling for it.

LunarG wrote:

rodimus80 - Is your card unbearably loud? Mine is extremely whiny, so much so, that I'm going to have to custom build quiet cooling for it.

My Parhelia is. It's not uncommon for video cards from that time though.

My G400 MAX is virtually silent. The Perhelia is like a small jet fighter about to take off. It's also radiating quite a lot of heat, so I don't think passive cooling would cut it unless it's quite large. There used to be a Zalman heatpipe solution that people on matroxusers tended to go for, but I doubt you can get that anymore. I might convert an old CPU heat sink.

Parhelia isn't dissipating that much power. Note that it doesn't need auxiliary power. It's just that the super cheap heatsink they used has minimal surface area. The heatsink isn't much bigger than that on a G400 Max but the fan must be running around 6000 RPM.

I have a few Chinese knockoffs of the Zalman VF700 that I use on various old cards. These would have no problem with a Parhelia, if they fit its mount points. Examples:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-VGA-Video-Card-Co … =item3f16a5384e
http://www.ebay.com/itm/VGA-Video-Card-Coolin … =item33745791be

Right, a little bit of appliance oil actually quieted that fan down to a much more livable noise level. Will it also reduce the lifespan of the fan? Possibly 😜 I'll have to replace it anyway. I've also mounted an 80mm fan in a PCI slot next to the Parhelia just to keep move the air in the case a bit, as it's a standard Compaq desktop case with limited cooling. But yes, the oil actually helped a lot. I think the bearings on this particular fan might be very low quality. Thanks for the ebay links, I might just get something like that. I also found a passive heatpipe cooler that might work, but that's genuine Zalman, and not really cheap.