Reviewed on:
Pentium 4 2.8 GHz Windows XP Home PC with 1GB of RAM and an ATI X800 video card.Also available for:
Windows PCs
The Good:
Easy setup; simple configuration; good range of resolutions; lets you split a game or Windows desktop across multiple monitors.The Bad:
Only works with specific games that are compatible with its drivers; only works with analogue monitors (no DVI connectors); game menus can be split across multiple screens, making them hard to read and use; pricey.The Verdict:
An excellent gadget for desktop power-users who want to increase their desktop space, and for power-gamers looking for an edge.
REVIEW:
Ever find that no matter what size your monitor is, you never have enough on-screen working space for all the windows you want to have open? Or wish you had a wraparound display for games? Matrox has a sophisticated piece of hardware called the TripleHead2Go that deals with this problem in a pretty simple way: It lets you add more monitors.
Three of them, to be exact.
The TripleHead2Go is a small box about the size of a small paperback book, sporting one VGA input and three outputs. This box basically fools the computer into thinking it is connected to a single huge monitor (with a resolution of up to 3,840-by-1,024), when in reality the TripleHead2Go splits the signal across three smaller monitors at resolutions of up to 1,280-by-1,024 each.
You can get video cards that do something similar, but they come at a premium and you're tossing that investment away the next time you upgrade. The TripleHead2Go is designed to work with most of the ATI- and Nvidia-based video cards developed in the past few years - check the Matrox website for a compatibility list - as well as any monitor with a VGA port (there's no DVI connector option for digital LCD panels, at least on the first generation model). It's an investment that should outlast your next few video card upgrades, which is a good thing, because at around $299 (U.S.), it doesn't come cheap. (Matrox also has a two-monitor DualHead2Go model for about $130 less.)
What's the benefit of plunking down this kind of cash for more on-screen real estate, you ask? My wife asked the same thing, until she saw it in action. Then she wanted one for her work PC.
Basically, this product is aimed at two types of people: Power-users who use their PCs for intensive on-screen work; and power-gamers who use it for play.
The benefit for the first group is that the TripleHead2Go is an easy way to increase your desktop real estate. For the price of one 30-inch LCD monitor these days, for example, you could get three 17-inchers plus a TripleHead2Go, save a few bucks and end up with a lot more screen space to work with. Or you could go the cheap route, like I did, and find several old 17-inch CRT monitors - I got two of them for free from neighbours who had upgraded to LCDs, and you can find dirt-cheap CRTs without much searching during garage sale season.
Once set up, the TripleHead2Go gives you a single Windows desktop spread across three monitors. The Windows Start button is on the left-hand monitor, the middle monitor is empty blue space with a taskbar across the bottom, and the part of the workspace with the clock and icons for programs running in the background are on the right-hand monitor. Move the mouse sideways, and when it gets to the edge of one screen it disappears and reappears on the adjacent screen, jumping from one to the next.
It's a bit disorienting at first, but once you get used to it, it's really handy. For example, you could open a chat window and RSS feed in the right-hand window. At the same time, you could have a website displayed in the left-hand window, and work on a word processor or spreadsheet in the centre window. If you have a TV tuner in your computer, you can have it stream video to one of the screens while you work on another. Or you can edit video with the source window displayed on one screen and the edited video on another. All you have to do is drag and drop the program window onto the monitor you want it displayed on.
