About a month after the announcement, Matrox Graphics started to sell its Parhelia 256MB graphics cards in retail. Of course, the availability is not wide, however, the fact that the company has started to deliver its new products is real.

Matrox Parhelia 256MB supports up to three displays and a TV-Out. The core-clock of the graphics card is 200MHz, while the memory clock is 250MHz. In contrast, Parhelia 128MB is clocked at 220/275MHz for VPU/memory, thus, can offer better performance in almost all applications. The design of the graphics card is similar to than that of the predecessor, see the pictures here and here. The pricing of the graphics card is enormous. As I learned over Akiba PC Hotline, Japanese retailers sell the Matrox Parhelia 256MB graphics card for $635-$700. In the USA there is only one company to offer the product, according to Pricewatch. They want to sell it for $569, shipping fee not included.

Matrox Graphics positions its Parhelia 256MB for the most demanding 3D workstation users on the AEC, DCC, MCAD and GIS markets. Given that Matrox’s solutions cannot offer high enough performance in professional applications, there will be no sense for professional designers or engineers to get the Parhelia 256MB, especially while there are relatively cheap professional graphics cards from NVIDIA, 3Dlabs or ATI.