Hands-On Report--ProMax Dual Head Graphics Card with v2.0 Drivers

When we last reviewed the ProMax Dual Head display card (DH-MAX) last November, ProMax Systems had just released it with version 1.0 of its drivers. We promised an update when the second version of its drivers were released. Version 2.0 of the drivers for the DH-MAX came out recently.

In November the DH-MAX was then and, to our knowledge, it still is the only AGP graphics card for the AGP Power Mac G4's that will run two monitors simultaneously off the one AGP slot. In fact, as we were first to show, the DH-MAX will even fit into the smaller space available in the G4 Cube making both a very nice package for graphics designers.

We only noted two issues in our review. The first was that the DH-MAX was relatively slow when compared with even the stock ATI Rage 128 that shipped with the original Power Mac G4 AGP and much slower than the optional ATI Radeon card. The ATI card was replaced with nVidia's GeForce2 MX cards in the current crop of Power Mac G4's and ATI's Radeon graphics card remains an option. Here is part of the table from our November review:

ProMax Drivers v1.0 (November 2000)

Test	DH-MAX	Rage 128	Radeon
Walker Spin (fps)	18.0	12.0	36.0
MacBench 5 Graphics Score	2218	3356	3489

The data were generated with a 400 MHz Power Mac G4 AGP running Mac OS 9.1. Walker Spin, in frames per second, tests performance with QuickDraw 3D. MacBench 5.0 tests general graphics performance. Neither are AltiVec aware, however.

The original Power Mac G4 400 has since been replaced with a Power Mac G4 533 DP so we re-ran our tests above, added several others, using the DH-MAX and nVidia GeForce2 MX cards in the newer G4 also running Mac OS 9.1. Here are the results:

ProMax Drivers v2.0

Test	DH-MAX	GeForce2
Walker Spin (fps)	22	32
MacBench 5 Graphics	3496	4518
MacBench 5 Publishing Graphics	1330	1229
Scroll 136p Acrobat Reader 5 Document (sec)	275	231

There is a relative improvement in the DH-MAX card using its v2.0 drivers and it is faster than the nVidia card on the MacBench 5 Publishing Graphics test. Note that Acrobat Reader v5.0 takes a very long time to scroll through the 136 page test document. Acrobat Reader 4.0.5a took 20-30 seconds when we previously used it in the scrolling test.

The other issue is that while the DH-MAX is based on the Matrox Millennium with 3D acceleration, there was no OpenGL driver for it. There isn't an OpenGL driver in v2.0 so serious 3D gaming with the DH-MAX is still not much of an option despite it working better with QuickDraw's RAVE driver. ProMax responded that they expect to have an OpenGL driver by "Late Summer."

The DH-MAX is an improved solution for those who need to run 2 monitors simultaneously and not use up a precious PCI slot with a second graphics card. The DH-MAX is, we believe, the only means to do so with a G4 Cube. It retails for $299.