First Impressions

Nice box you got there

Even before you first open up the Marvel G400-TV box, you get to see the Marvel's connector box in a little plastic window in the front of the box. The connector box itself is very well designed. Kamran Ahmed, the Marvel G400's product manager, pointed out that people had trouble with the shape and light weight of the Voodoo 3 3500's A/V pod, because it was difficult to get the pod to sit correctly. The Marvel's connector box has the shape and heft needed to keep the box in place.

The Box

You hook up the connector box to the second output on the Marvel card. The connector box features left and right audio, composite video, S-video, and TV antenna/cable inputs. The Marvel cable also connects to the line-in and line-out of the system's sound card. The connector box features left and right audio outputs, a composite video output, and an S-video output.

The front of the card

The memory

The Board

The card itself doesn't look very intimidating. You first notice that the TV tuner isn't on the card. Matrox moved it onto the connector box. The card only has two outputs, one for the primary monitor and the second for the Marvel connector box. There's no output for a second monitor, and you'll have to use a television for all your DualHead activities. In addition to the usual oversized heatsink and memory modules, there's a Zoran ZR36060 integrated JPEG Codec chip on the board.

Our Marvel uses four Samsung 6ns 4MB (32Mb) SGRAM chips that have a maximum speed rating of 166MHz. Like the normal Millenium G400, the Marvel's G400 chip only comes with a heatsink.