Matrox releases world's first PCIe 1X graphic card

THE MONTREAL BASED company that used to be a big player in computer graphic finally released something unique. Matrox has just announced its Millennium G550 PCIe graphic card what is supposed to be the world's first PCIe 1X graphic card.

It should work in any PCIe slot you have and is intended to be compatible with any PCIe compliant slot. The card is based on Matrox G550 marchitecture and will support dual Head supping for using two digital or analogue displays at the same time. We checked a little bit out and it turns out that G550 is a business chip that will join just released Matrox QID LP PCIe, Millennium P650 PCIe 128, and Millennium P650 LP PCIe 64 cards. The card supports 32 MB of frame buffer memory, using 64 bit memory interface. The chip has only two pipelines but can process two textures per clock, but lacking the support for vertex Shader units. It obviously is not going to be the fastest 3D graphics gizmo on the block, but it should be good for banking and other multi display businesses.

It's a passively cooled cards and Matrox is aiming it at mission critical systems, servers and industrial computers who don't have PCIe 16X slots on boards.

Matrox goes one step forward as apart from Windows drivers, it will offer open source display driver for Linux and other Unixoid operating systems.

It will be available in August and it should cost $139. Matrox went very quiet after it lost the game with Parhelia in 3D market but you never know what might happen in this field. Nvidia and ATI are just too strong to be toppled right now.

You can get some more details about Matrox cards here. µ