Introduction
Matrox has always been known for creating high quality products. However, with all of the competition in the video card market, they have been somewhat eclipsed by rivals ATI and NVIDIA in gaming performance and the low-end market. Nonetheless, Matrox's response was to continue creating innovating products with interesting features such as dual head capabilities for one video card, which their competitors have since started to implement.
With the introduction of the Marvel G450 eTV, they continue this tradition. Targeted at users wanting an "all-in-one graphics solution for home entertainment and the Web", the eTV is built around the G450 chip and 32MB of DDR memory, which allows Matrox to build a card that runs faster, cooler, and cheaper. This card is designed to be a true all-in-one product by including a TV tuner, video In/Out, S-video, DVD playback, VCR recording features, intro-level video editing, and extremely solid video output.
As you can see from the following list of specifications, the eTV can do just about anything you want:
- 0.18-micron technology
- 64-bit Double Data Rate (DDR) external bus to frame buffer memory
- Full AGP 4X device with multi-threaded bus mastering
- Support for AGP 1X, 2X and 4X
- 360 MHz Primary RAMDAC
- Integrated second RAMDAC
- Integrated TV encoder
- 3D Rendering Array Process architecture
- 32 MB frame buffer configurations supported
- 32-bit Z-buffer including 8-bit stencil buffer
- DVD & video playback
- Matrox DualHead TV Out
- MPEG-2 capture and playback
- S-video and composite video input /output
- Video Editing
- Timeshifting with picture-in-picture
- TV tuner with Personal Video Recorder
- Closed captioning (North America)
- Teletext browsing (Europe)
Setup
Installing the Marvel G450 eTV was extremely straightforward and simple. The total time from opening the box to watching CNN was only about ten minutes. Setup consisted of removing the old video card and inserting the eTV into the AGP slot. After that, just rebooting the system and installing the appropriate software is a breeze. In fact, the software even guides you through connecting the numerous cables to the back of the card.
This may be a potential problem with the card simply because to hook up the cables in the proper spot you'll have to physically crawl behind or move the computer case to get access. With so much connectivity, it would have been nice if there was a small desktop box to plug all the cables into especially if you'll be doing a lot of cable swapping. Nonetheless, you can input a signal from either a video camcorder, cable line, TV antenna, or VCR through the built in tuner or send it out back to a VCR, TV, or through the VCR to the TV. What this means is that you can do video editing, send it to the VCR, and then record it while you're watching that output! All of these features mean that the aspiring video editor will not be hardware limited in any way.
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