1x PCIe card sufaces - A Matrox card

[Steve]

My first graphics card was a Matrox, a Mystique 220 with 4MB VRAM if memory serves. I remember it fondly, particularly killing it during a BIOS flash and having to replace it with that sort of OK (read: amazing) Voodoo 3 2000.

Anyway, that was a long time ago, and I digress. Matrox has a new card and it's a PCIe Millennium G550. What makes it special is that it uses a single PCIe lane configuration. That means it should work in any PCIe slot, not just the 16x PEG slots we're used to putting graphics cards into. Tom's Hardware reports:

The new card is based on Matrox' G550 chip, comes with 32 MByte DDR memory, delivers display resolutions of up to 1600 x 1200 pixels and supports output to two digital or analog monitors at a time. The company includes drivers for Windows 2000, XP and Linux (Red Hat, Suse, and Mandrake). The G550 PCIe is not a product that aims at consumers, but, according to Matrox, appeals to "financial and enterprise professionals" instead. The card is available now for $140.

While aimed at "financial and enterprise professionals" I bet this would also make a good card for extra displays, given Matrox's history with multimonitors. What do you think?