Matrox PowerDesk HF

This utility combines all the options for Matrox Parhelia configuring. It's quite pleasant to the eye for its stylish, colorful and at the same time not pressing design that is done in corporate Matrox' shades of blue.

The main menu window of PowerDesk HF contains links to separate sections. On passing the mouse pointer over a menu item, you get its description in the box below:

Let's browse through the sections one by one.

If you're not looking forward to reading a long enumeration of all Matrox PowerDesk features, just leave out this part of the review and pass over to the next one the performance tests :) !

Multi-Display Setup:

This section serves to set up multi-display configurations in DualHead and TripleHead modes.

Monitor and TV Adjustments:

Here you can adjust the image output onto the display or TV. The possible display devices are listed on the left. Choose the one you like and come over to the settings window:

It's possible to adjust the size and position of the picture in the screen for a CRT display, as well as set up the refresh rate with up to 1GHz precision.

In this section you can choose the TV-out standard and set the image geometry and gamma for the TV screen.

Matrox Parhelia allows adjusting both positioning and size of the picture on the TV screen. This helps to avoid the typical situation when the image appears much larger or smaller than the visible screen area.

Here you can set brightness, contrast, hue and saturation of the image displayed on the TV screen as well as the anti-flickering level.

Quality and Performance Settings:

From this page you can access the Matrox Parhelia settings for work in Windows GUI and 3D.

In this window you can turn on Glyph Anti-Aliasing, adjust the fonts subjective "boldness" and turn on the GigaColor mode.

Here we configure Matrox Parhelia for work in 3D. The options include: turning on GigaColor for games, setting up the Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing mode (4x supersampling if the application needs it, FAA 16x if the application needs it, forced 4x supersampling, forced FAA 16x), texture filtering mode (available options: determined by the application, forced tri-linear filtering, forced anisotropic filtering), the VSync mode (available options: determined by the application, always on, always off).

Video Playback Settings:

Here you can turn on the DVDMax mode and go to its settings window, turn on hardware motion compensation and pass to video playback settings.

In the DualHead DVDMax settings window you can set the modes of scaling and video output onto the display or TV. The available zoom options are full screen or preserve the original image proportions. The image proportions can be defined either by the size of the window for video playback or by the video size.

Moreover, you can define the TV aspect ratio - 4x3 or 16x9.

In this section you can adjust the colors of the image displayed in overlay. The settings allow changing brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and gamma. In order to control the settings and the changes, there's an additional window displaying the test image in overlay.

Desktop management:

Here you can set the way dialogs appear, windows open/close/resize when working with a multi-display configuration.

In the Matrox MultiDesk window you can attune applications for the work with several virtual desktops.

Matrox Zoom:

In this section the user can define the area to be displayed full-screen on the secondary display. The user can turn on bi-linear filtering of the displayed area as well as the cursor tracing mode: do not move the area, move the area when the mouse reaches its borders, or move the area with the mouse pointer in the center of the area.

Here you can set the enlarged pixels mode (2x or 4x) on the current display. There's no need in an additional display for this. The mode is useful in various graphics editors. The only thing missing here, I guess, is an opportunity to make the mouse less sensitive appropriate to the pixels enlargement.

You can assign "hot keys" for switching on DualHead Zoom and PixelTouch modes.

Matrox Tools:

In this section you can select a screen area to be saved onto the HDD or into the clipboard.

Information:

Here you can see the information on the graphics card and the display devices connected to it.

Help

I guess the name of the section speaks for itself. From here you can update the drivers, read the documentation that is stored locally or have a look at the FAQ and ask your question on the technical support forum on the Matrox web-site.

My Matrox:

From here you can go to the Matrox website, register or update the software.

After all this rather tedious enumeration of the Matrox PowerDesk features, I can assure you that its friendly interface and simplicity won't disappoint you. Everything is handy, simple and easy.