Video
Purchase date:
16 Dec 1999
Price:
$139
Vendor:
You can never obtain the latest wonder-of-a-video-card that's just been reviewed in one of the popular computer hardware web sites. Manufacturers send video cards to reviewers months before sending video cards to vendors. Many vendors will advertise a video card many months before the card is available, in order to generate advance sales orders for these cards. I used to wait months to receive the latest card from Matrox or Nvidia after placing my order with a vendor. Ridiculous. My practice now is to choose my video card from among those cards that are available readily and priced reasonably.
In mid-December 1999 I chose a Matrox Millennium G400 with a 300MHz Random Access Memory Digital-to-Analog Converter (RAMDAC) chip and 32MB of Synchronous Graphics Random Access Memory (SGRAM). The RAMDAC converts digital information from a computer program into analog signals that are sent to an analog color video monitor.
I obtained a single-head (that is, equipped with a single VGA connector) Millennium G400, in the unadorned Original Equipment Manufacturer (Oem) package, for $139 from Comp-U-Plus.