Matrox Graphics this week announced its yet another graphics card designed for PCI Express x1 slot. The new Matrox Millennium G550 Low-Profile PCIe product primarily aims small form-factor systems and provides them with 2D functionality and high-quality 2D graphics.

“The Matrox Millennium G550 LP PCIe’s low-profile design adds versatility to the popular Millennium G550 Series product line as it's able to accommodate a wide variety of PCI Express systems. In addition, its distinctive PCIe x1 design is ideally suited for systems with no available PCIe x16 slot,” said Jean-Levy Beaudoin, business development manager, Matrox Graphics.

Just like Matrox Millennium G550 PCIe unveiled in mid-July, the new addition to the company’s lineup is based on the Millennium G550 chip for PCI bus and 32MB of memory. The graphics card is equipped with Texas Instruments (TI) XIO2000 bridge chip that converts 32-bit/33MHz PCI signals into PCI Express x1. The board features one LFH60 connector that transmit the signal to either two LCD or two CRT displays with a splitter and appropriate adapters in case of monitors with analogue input.

Matrox Millennium G550 LP PCIe sports all technologies introduced by Matrox Graphics for desktop-oriented applications, including multi-display features that include Matrox Clone and Matrox Multi-Display Zoom in addition to resolution support for Stretched and Independent desktop mode.

The Matrox Millennium G550 PCIe is based on Matrox G550 technology with 32MB of memory that connects to chip using 64-bit bus and has DualHead support for using 2 digital or analog monitors at a time. The graphics chip Millenium G550 was originally released in early Summer 2001, four years back, it lacks DirectX 8.0 functionality and features 2 rendering pipelines with two texture units per each. While performance of the Matrox Millennium G550 LP PCIe graphics card in 3D application is likely to be on a very low level today, the main intention of the card is to provide advanced 2D functionality to modern small form-factor systems that lack PCI Express x16 support.

The Millennium G550 LP PCIe will be available in Q3 2005 at a list price of $169. This product will be available from authorized resellers worldwide or, in North America and Europe, directly from Matrox via its online store.