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Look Who's Here: Matrox With Two Graphics Cards

By - Source: Matrox | B 27 comments

Matrox has built two graphics cards for the professional market, both of which carry AMD GPUs.

Matrox is back! Okay, not really, as they've been working in the professional space for a while now, but that is what everyone screams whenever we see a new Matrox product come along, right? Matrox has announced two new graphics cards for the professional market, the C420 LP and the C680.

The C420 LP is a low-profile graphics card that is capable of driving four individual displays with resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600. It's a low-power card and can therefore be passively cooled. The C680 is a single-slot graphics card capable of driving up to six 4K displays. It's no longer a low-power card, but that's not all that surprising because six 4K monitors is a lot of pixels to push. Do note that you will only be able to push 60 Hz across the 4K panels with the C680 if you've only got three displays attached; any more and they will operate at 30 Hz.

Both of the cards are based on AMD GPUs, and they both carry 2 GB of GDDR5 graphics memory. No details were given on how many shaders these GPUs have, or what clocks they run at, although they do support DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.4 and OpenCL 1.2. The graphics cards operate over a PCI-Express x16 interface and have support for all the latest Windows operating systems and Linux distros.

You're probably wondering who these cards are aimed at, but that's simple: folks who need a lot of screen real estate and want a very reliable graphics card to power them. Working in the professional space, Matrox is set on ensuring that its cards are as reliable as possible. These cards can also be used for digital signage, and in order to ensure that you don't get tearing or artifacts between the various displays, they also come with a frame-lock feature, which ensures that all the attached displays are refreshed simultaneously, even if you're using more than one of these cards.

Matrox did not reveal pricing, although you probably don't want to know anyway.

Niels Broekhuijsen thinks Matrox is cool, and that they should make their way onto the consumer market once again. Follow him at @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

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  • 9 Hide
    Gazabi , September 11, 2014 3:13 PM
    It says "if you've only got three displays attacked." I'm pretty sure its supposed to be attached.
  • 6 Hide
    PandaButtonFTW , September 11, 2014 4:19 PM
    Quote:
    It says "if you've only got three displays attacked." I'm pretty sure its supposed to be attached.



    well, maybe it is attacked, who knows what kind of diabolical things that amd based card is doing to those poor monitors!
  • -2 Hide
    builder4 , September 11, 2014 4:19 PM
    They should make a 4k Sextuple Head 2 Go
  • Add your comment Display all 27 comments.
  • 9 Hide
    beetlejuicegr , September 11, 2014 4:46 PM
    Now if only 3dfx appeared and bought her self back from nvidia .,,,,
  • 5 Hide
    Alec Mowat , September 11, 2014 4:46 PM
    Quote:
    Now if only 3dfx appeared and bought her self back from nvidia .,,,,


    I miss Glide too....
  • 7 Hide
    CaedenV , September 11, 2014 6:10 PM
    Man I miss Matrox! My first real GPU setup was a G550 paired with an RT2500; that thing was a 2D beast back in 2001, and I remember having issues getting HDDs fast enough to feed those cards for video editing. To think that now my phone has more video editing capability than that costly and power hungry setup.

    *sigh* remember when Matrox tried to get into gaming... that was fun times!
  • -4 Hide
    Marcus52 , September 11, 2014 6:19 PM
    If Matrox can get these things to drive that many displays @ 60Hz, and in one case do it with a passive cooler, why can't AMD and Nvidia? You can't drive 3 4K displays at 60 Hz with their top end consumer grade dual-GPU solutions, and those require beastly coolers.

    My guess is that these cards aren't worth a flip at gaming, that's the biggest difference. On the other hand it shows to me that both the major desktop graphics card companies are either holding back or thinking inside a box that prevents them from truly innovating. We are told by the hardware press that we are going to have to be satisfied with a slower GPU development cycle because of the difficulties involved in continued die shrinks, but, frankly, I think they just got lazy and depended on the die shrinks so they could have a smaller R&D budget.

    I don't buy it for a second.

    And we can certainly make use of serious performance boosts. 2560x1440 @ 144Hz. 4K @ 60Hz. Now is not the time for Nvidia and AMD to drag their proverbial feet.
  • 2 Hide
    sykozis , September 11, 2014 6:59 PM
    These cards aren't aimed at gamers. Most of what Matrox does, is 2D, which is quite easy to render at 4K. Even my R7 240 can handle 2D at 4K..... the "depth of field" is what kills a graphics card trying to render a 3D scene at 4K.
  • 0 Hide
    Innocent_Bystander , September 11, 2014 7:34 PM
    $$$$Thousands. And they will be lapped up by the target audience simply because Matrox's professional line of products is awesome.

    I only used their framegrabbers but I never had a complaint about their performance or the company's service when I needed it.
  • 0 Hide
    lp231 , September 11, 2014 8:13 PM
    Last time I've heard of Matrox was like 2000 or so. Boy does time fly. :) 
    More info and images on C420 and C680
    http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/c-series/c420/
    http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/c-series/c680/#close
  • 1 Hide
    palladin9479 , September 11, 2014 10:15 PM
    For those asking about why 60 vs 30 / ect.. and why don't our current batch of consumer cards do this, it has to do with the RAMDAC's on the cards. We have long sinced moved away from analogue video signals to digital and so "RAMDAC" is kind of a misnomer now as it's really just the chip that converts the contents of the video frame in memory into a digital signal going out to that individual display, usually with TMDS. The speed and quality of the RAMDAC is what determines maximum output resolution and signaling rate. What matrox has done is take a typical dGPU and put several high end professional RAMDAC's on them. There are still limitations and so that's why you get 3x60 or 6x30 at maximum resolution, I'm willing to bet there are three RAMDAC chips capable of running in split channel mode.
  • 2 Hide
    Drejeck , September 11, 2014 11:34 PM
    wall street graphics card
  • 3 Hide
    N.Broekhuijsen , September 12, 2014 12:17 AM
    Quote:
    It says "if you've only got three displays attacked." I'm pretty sure its supposed to be attached.
    This would be correct. I must've felt a subconscious need to attack a display.

  • 1 Hide
    Nuckles_56 , September 12, 2014 1:30 AM
    Quote:
    Quote:
    It says "if you've only got three displays attacked." I'm pretty sure its supposed to be attached.
    This would be correct. I must've felt a subconscious need to attack a display.


    That poor display...
  • 0 Hide
    Poul Wrist , September 12, 2014 6:08 AM
    I actually do want to know the price :p  I have a need for something like this in a build of a security cam driving PC I am looking at constructing for a client.
  • 0 Hide
    EasyLover , September 12, 2014 10:09 AM
    Interesting!
  • -1 Hide
    Marcus52 , September 12, 2014 10:19 AM
    Quote:
    These cards aren't aimed at gamers. Most of what Matrox does, is 2D, which is quite easy to render at 4K. Even my R7 240 can handle 2D at 4K..... the "depth of field" is what kills a graphics card trying to render a 3D scene at 4K.


    Yes, I said that in my post (though you did go into more detail).

    I suspect those that down-voted me didn't thoroughly read what I wrote.

  • -1 Hide
    Marcus52 , September 12, 2014 10:44 AM
    Quote:
    For those asking about why 60 vs 30 / ect.. and why don't our current batch of consumer cards do this, it has to do with the RAMDAC's on the cards. We have long sinced moved away from analogue video signals to digital and so "RAMDAC" is kind of a misnomer now as it's really just the chip that converts the contents of the video frame in memory into a digital signal going out to that individual display, usually with TMDS. The speed and quality of the RAMDAC is what determines maximum output resolution and signaling rate. What matrox has done is take a typical dGPU and put several high end professional RAMDAC's on them. There are still limitations and so that's why you get 3x60 or 6x30 at maximum resolution, I'm willing to bet there are three RAMDAC chips capable of running in split channel mode.


    This points to the kind of thing I'm talking about.

    If the power can't come directly from the GPU, then find another way to do it. There is no reason at all that separate RAMDACs for gaming graphics can't be designed and built (there is actually some of that going on in current GPUs made by Nvidia and AMD) to assist the GPU in transferring more data faster.

    Instead of thinking "well it can't be done with current hardware designs", I want them to think "How CAN we do it?"

  • -3 Hide
    coolitic , September 12, 2014 2:35 PM
    First time I'm hearing "power-efficient" and "AMD" in the same sentence.

    Congratulations to AMD on the progress.
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