Price: US $145
Availability: September

In the early days of 3D, Matrox was a consumer and business 3D pioneer and a performance leader. They had the first consumer card with 32-bit color as well as the performance lead early on. They pioneered the adoption of environment-mapped bump mapping for consumer cards, a feature that is now appearing in several cards from other makers. They even had the 3D performance lead for quite a while. But Matrox's primary strength has always been in 2D graphics, where we have consistently viewed them as having the best cards available for the past several generations.

The G400 built on Matrox's 2D strength with its dual-head feature, giving the user two monitor outputs in a one processor, one card solution. While gamers and game developers gave this feature a lukewarm reception, preferring faster 3D cards from NVIDIA and 3dfx, the G400 was accepted and welcomed by those actually working (gasp!) with their machine. Matrox has decided to capitalize on their strengths for business use with their new G450, which is best described as a massaged and tweaked G400 that capitalizes on dual head output.

Back in May, we brought you an article telling about Matrox's upcoming Millennium G450. Well, the upcoming card has arrived at the Sharky Extreme compound and we have put it through a series of benchmarks as well as some general usage to tell you how it looks. Please keep in mind that, since we only had beta drivers to test with, this is not a review. It is a preview, so you should not make any final buying decisions from only this article.