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PCI-X graphics, anyone?

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First post, by manbearpig

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I just picked up a Tyan Trinity S2707 board and its got onboard video but was curious about PCI-X, having never used it before.

Anyone have any experience with the various PCI-X graphics cards out there?

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Reply 1 of 22, by Errius

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As I understand PCI-X video cards are intended for CAD and are not good for games. A regular PCI card is probably your best bet.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 2 of 22, by Unknown_K

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Not that many around and they are expensive. Matrox made a decent one but its pricey and hard to find. A shame really because PCI-X networking, SCSI, SATA cards are dirt cheap now.

Don't think there are any CAD cards for PCI-X , CAD went for AGP Pro mostly.

Collector of old computers, hardware, and software

Reply 5 of 22, by dottoss

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Jade Falcon wrote:

If I recall there were pcix Matrox Parhelia's

You're correct,

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/le … parheliapci256/
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/le … iaprecisionsgt/
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/le … iaprecisionsdt/
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/le … /parheliahr256/
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/le … rheliadl256pci/

Their QID Pro series is also PCI-X
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/le … _series/qidpro/

I do own this one: It is not PCI-X but it's 66mhz PCI compliant like many other PCI Matrox Cards.
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gr … ries/g450x4mms/

If one really wants to take full advantage of the PCI-X bus Parhelia is the way to go.

Reply 6 of 22, by manbearpig

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Thanks guys, I'll keep that in the back of my head in case I come across one cheap. For now it will just sit in my "stash".

Not really looking to go for an adaptor, I would just use a pci-e motherboard.

Premio 212B motherboard (MSI MS-6112)
Intel PentiumII 333MHz Slot 1 66MHz bus
384MB ECC 66MHz
SIIG ATA133 controller --> Seagate Barracuda 80GB
SIIG Gigabit Ethernet (RTL8169) / USB 2.0 / IEEE1394 controller
ESS 1869 soundcard on board wavetable synth

Reply 7 of 22, by dexvx

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I had and sold a few Matrox Parhelia PCI-X (256MB). I'm sure they have their niche uses, but for general purpose gaming performance, they were horrid (probably due to drivers).

Reply 9 of 22, by dexvx

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Those particular Matrox Parhelia's (PCI-X) are not for gaming. It is very possible that the drivers are tuned for CAD/GIS or whatever, where the precision matters over performance.

2D performance was great, and image quality was very sharp.

Reply 10 of 22, by Jepael

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koverhbarc wrote:

How, exactly? I assume those extra pins are there for a reason and may as well be used; these 64-bit cards might have the fastest 2D speed of all.

For example the Parhelia was 64-bit at only 66MHz bus speed.
That's equivalent to AGP 2x only.

Reply 11 of 22, by Bobolaf

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As people have said most PCI-X cards are professional oriented. The Matrox Parhelia people have mentioned is a ok ish gaming card if your in to early Windows 2k/xp gaming and about the best PCI-x gaming card I have found. Driver support for early games was not so good and it was simply to slow for later games. The GT430 standard PCI may be worth a look as it will work in a PCI-X slot. I was always tempted to try a PCI-X to 4x PCIe bridge adapter and use a low profile PCIe card. The issue is the bridge costs a fortune and no idea if it will actually work.

Reply 12 of 22, by vlask

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Beware of older profi vga cards like HP Visualize or IBM Power series - these are not PC compactible and won't work....

Not only mine graphics cards collection at http://www.vgamuseum.info

Reply 13 of 22, by nforce4max

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Matrox did at one point tried to market the Parhelia as a gaming card but they were very late to getting the card on the market and worse it was weak let alone the drivers. They could have done ok with it had they made it on a smaller process and scaled up the overall design but it still would have been slower than a GF 6600-6800 however it would have been beastly in CAD. There isn't much else out there so you are screwed unless suffer through with a bottlenecked pci card or bottleneck a newer pci-e or agp card with an adapter which likely isn't cheap.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 14 of 22, by dexvx

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nforce4max wrote:

Matrox did at one point tried to market the Parhelia as a gaming card but they were very late to getting the card on the market and worse it was weak let alone the drivers. They could have done ok with it had they made it on a smaller process and scaled up the overall design but it still would have been slower than a GF 6600-6800 however it would have been beastly in CAD. There isn't much else out there so you are screwed unless suffer through with a bottlenecked pci card or bottleneck a newer pci-e or agp card with an adapter which likely isn't cheap.

What do you mean smaller process for the Parhelia? Parhelia, GeForce 4 Ti, and the Radeon 9700 all used the 150nm process node. Anything smaller would've been unfeasible... 130nm wasn't available until 2H 2003 (Parhelia was Q2 2002). I think the Parhelia's problem was the fact that Matrox decided to abandon the gaming GPU market in 1999, after the G400. G400 wasn't the best, but it was certainly a viable choice, depending on its price. Coming back after a 4 year hiatus out of practice doesn't bode well. Late to market is subjective, because on paper it should've rivaled Ti4600/R9700... and it launched between those 2 cards.

Technical issues are covered by Anandtech ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/936/6 ).
1. No Occlusion Culling. It had the highest theoretical MTexel fill rate, but that was entirely wasted because of this. This probably contributed to the wasted memory bandwidth and the over complicated 512-bit memory design. This in turn drove up costs.
2. T&L is incredibly weak in certain situations (1 light) and subpar at best.
3. Subpar shader performance (matching only a GeForce 3 era card).

Reply 15 of 22, by Bobolaf

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This is the bridge I keep thinking of using https://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/Slot- … -Card~PCIX1PEX4 if it does recognise as a graphics card and does run at x4 PCIe it should be able to feed quite a quick card.

Reply 16 of 22, by RJDog

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Bobolaf wrote:

This is the bridge I keep thinking of using https://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/Slot- … -Card~PCIX1PEX4 if it does recognise as a graphics card and does run at x4 PCIe it should be able to feed quite a quick card.

Neat! I've seen the reverse (PCI-Express to PCI) but not this direction.

Reply 17 of 22, by koverhbarc

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Jepael wrote:
koverhbarc wrote:

How, exactly? I assume those extra pins are there for a reason and may as well be used; these 64-bit cards might have the fastest 2D speed of all.

For example the Parhelia was 64-bit at only 66MHz bus speed.
That's equivalent to AGP 2x only.

Yes, from the specs only. But its being professional meant it could probably use all that bandwidth, while consumer-level cards (or their drivers) often won't because the manufacturers don't care about 2D performance.

Reply 18 of 22, by lazibayer

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I briefly used PCI-X version of Parhelia but didn't do any benchmark with it. It feels like... a regular video card 😊
Be aware that many PCI-X video cards on ebay are from SUN workstations and non bootable on PCs.

Reply 19 of 22, by Reputator

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dexvx wrote:
What do you mean smaller process for the Parhelia? Parhelia, GeForce 4 Ti, and the Radeon 9700 all used the 150nm process node. […]
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What do you mean smaller process for the Parhelia? Parhelia, GeForce 4 Ti, and the Radeon 9700 all used the 150nm process node. Anything smaller would've been unfeasible... 130nm wasn't available until 2H 2003 (Parhelia was Q2 2002). I think the Parhelia's problem was the fact that Matrox decided to abandon the gaming GPU market in 1999, after the G400. G400 wasn't the best, but it was certainly a viable choice, depending on its price. Coming back after a 4 year hiatus out of practice doesn't bode well. Late to market is subjective, because on paper it should've rivaled Ti4600/R9700... and it launched between those 2 cards.

Technical issues are covered by Anandtech ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/936/6 ).
1. No Occlusion Culling. It had the highest theoretical MTexel fill rate, but that was entirely wasted because of this. This probably contributed to the wasted memory bandwidth and the over complicated 512-bit memory design. This in turn drove up costs.
2. T&L is incredibly weak in certain situations (1 light) and subpar at best.
3. Subpar shader performance (matching only a GeForce 3 era card).

A 4x4 architecture didn't exactly see much utilization in game engines of the time either. With so few of the texture units actually getting use, you were left with the measly 220MHz core clock stunting the real-world fillrate.

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