Matrox's Parhelia - A Performance Paradox

Turning the card to its front once again you'll see one prominent solder pad where a TV decoder chip can go. The Parhelia GPU already supports TV output through its internal encoder but video-in support will be made available through this external TV decoder chip. With Matrox's extensive history in video editing tools, you shouldn't be too surprised if a Parhelia with Video-In/Video-Out (VIVO) functionality is offered later on.

You'll notice that there aren't any heatsinks on the 3.3ns Infineon DDR SGRAM; a reason being that Matrox is only running the 300MHz memory at 275MHz because they aren't memory bandwidth limited at all (you'll understand why later).

Peeling off the heatsink on the GPU reveals an extremely large chip; from looking at the rear of the card you can tell that the die is much larger than a GeForce4.

The back of the Parhelia core

The back of the NV25/GeForce4 core

There are two DVI-I outputs on the card which are both driven by Chrontel CH7301-A TMDS transmitters. Matrox also bundles a DVI-to-VGA adapter and a DVI-to-dual VGA cable with all Parhelia cards.