MSRP: $235

In recent times, Matrox was fairly successful with their high-end Millennium G400 and G400 Max video cards. At the time those products began shipping, Matrox's OpenGL ICD was unfortunately fairly slow, which hindered its success. However, as time progressed the drivers were built and tweaked and the ICD became one of the best of its time.

Matrox then released their high end video product, the Marvel G400 TV, a very capable board targeted at users wanting "a powerful all-in-one graphics and video-editing card for the PC". Now they have targeted another segment of the market with the introduction of the Marvel G450 eTV.

Targeted at users wanting an "all-in-one graphics solution for home entertainment and the Web", the Marvel G450 eTV is primarily a cost-reduced version of the G400 with support for a few additional features, such as a DDR memory interface. Where the G400 was found to have a 128-bit SDR interface, the G450 uses DDR memory on a 64-bit interface. By using a 64-bit interface, packaging costs are reduced and thus the cost of the chip is reduced. Low-end DDR memory is typically very cheap, with costs similar to high-end SDR memory. With DDR memory the width of the memory interface is effectively doubled, theoretically allowing for the same data transfer rate of SDR memory at the same clock on 128-bit bus. Using such a scheme, Matrox is able to achieve better margins on the product.

While working in the low-end market, Matrox has not targeted consumers and OEM's with a general product for simply displaying 2D and 3D images. Rather, they've taken extra steps to develop more interesting technologies and to create products with them. For example, Matrox was early in releasing DualHead technology in a product that allowed for dual displays with a single graphics card. They have now been followed by ATI and NVIDIA. With the G450 they've taken the chip to the next level in doing this, integrating a separate RAMDAC for the secondary display.