Matrox G450

At the heart of the G450 sits an updated G400 chip with a second RAMDAC and a DDR memory interface. The rest of the core has remained unchanged, aside from being shrunk to an 0.18 micron process. Now, if your heart started beating higher when you heard the word "DDR", let me slow your pulse right down again: Matrox has decided to go with a 64Bit DDR memory interface. The old G400 cards are equipped with a 128Bit SDRAM interface. So since DDR RAM is only 85-90% as efficient as SDR at the same clockspeed, this is more of a small step backwards than an improvement.

Why would Matrox do this? Well, primarily to simplify the design, thereby reducing costs. Instead of 128 memory pathways the card now only needs 64 – half as expensive… By including the second RAMDAC in the chip, Matrox also saves the cost of the second (external) RAMDAC. The RAMDAC for the primary video output is clocked at 360 MHz, while the secondary output only gets 200 MHz. Due to the improved 0.18 micron production process, the chip stays a lot cooler than its predecessor. The card is clocked at 130 MHz (core) and 162MHz (memory). (That would be 324MHz DDR, but at 64Bit!).