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• 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
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• 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.
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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.

All this might sound like a minor productivity booster, but it was amazing how many mouse clicks were eliminated by simply having much-used programs displayed full time on the monitors flanking my main workspace. As I said, my wife - who scarcely gives any notice to most of the gadgets I review - was clamouring to get a multi-monitor setup on her work machine.

The benefits for work are pretty clear, but the other big market for the TripleHead2Go is power gamers.

The idea here is that instead of having a small view of the game you're playing through a single monitor, you can get a panoramic view of the action using three. In other words, the TripleHead2Go takes a widescreen game display and spits it out across three monitors.

There are caveats, though. First of all, the TripleHead2Go only works with games that its drivers have been tweaked to handle. The list is growing, but at the time of this review it was only around 150 games, and many of those were "oldies" such as Unreal Tournament 2004, Age of Mythology, Deux Ex, Aliens versus Predator 2 and Splinter Cell. The list is growing, and there are recent titles like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, but don't expect to be able to pick a brand new game right after its release and be able to play it through the TripleHead2Go.

When you first run a supported game after the TripleHead drivers have been installed, a special launch icon is generated on your desktop by the Matrox Surround Gaming Utility that lets you run the game in three-screen mode. After that, clicking this new icon launches the game and spreads it across three screens. It worked perfectly in Doom 3 and Unreal II, two of the supported games I tried it with.

The second problem is that you can't go to really high resolutions for each individual screen with the TripleHead2Go, so it's not for extreme screen-detail fanatics. Basically, even at the highest resolution of 3,840-by-1,024 you're actually getting three screens displaying 1,280-by-1,024 each. The main screen is showing the central view - what you'd normally see on a single-monitor system - and the left and right screens are displaying stuff that normally would be outside your field of view to either side, but all three screens generate a 1,280-by-1,024 image.

When I started testing the product, the drivers out of the box only supported relatively low refresh rates of 65 Hz and couldn't handle widescreen monitors. But then Matrox released an update, adding extra resolutions such as 3,840-by-720 and 3,840-by-768 for wide LCD and plasma screens. The new driver also boosted the maximum refresh rate to a more respectable 85 Hz, which helps reduce flicker on CRT screens.

The new driver also made one other important update: The ability to run just two screens instead of three if you choose. With the old drivers, it was either one screen or three, but the new ones let you set a combined resolution of 2,560-by-1,024 or 3,360-by-1,050 and run just two displays.

I was a little daunted about the prospect of multi-layered video drivers, and by the fact that the "manual" was a slip of paper, but installation proved to be pretty painless. First, I set the computer's monitor to a resolution of 800-by-600 and a refresh rate of 60 Hz, as recommended in the instructions. Then I installed the TripleHead2Go software, which took about two minutes, and turned the computer off.

Before flicking it back on, I unhooked the main monitor from the back of the computer and attached its cable to the "centre" port on the TripleHead2Go, and connected the right and left monitors to the appropriate ports on the unit as well. Then I connected the TripleHead2Go's input cable to the port on the computer's video card. When the TripleHead2Go was plugged in, I took a deep breath and turned on the PC.

It booted fine, giving me a regular Windows desktop on the centre monitor and asking me to confirm the resolution of 3,840-by-1,024 - or in other words, a resolution it could split three ways to drive each of the screens at 1,280-by-1,024.

This was where I ran into trouble, but it was the fault of my monitor and not the TripleHead2Go. I had cobbled together some old CRTs to make up a three-monitor set, and one of them had trouble with the 1,280-by-1,024 resolution, giving a flickering image. The other two monitors were fine, though, so I simply clicked with the mouse and "grabbed" the resolution-settings box in the flickering main screen, and dragged it sideways until it left the centre monitor and appeared on the left-hand one. Then I knocked the resolution setting for all three displays down to a level the middle monitor could handle, clicked "OK," and everything worked perfectly.

Of course, the big consideration is whether your graphics card has enough horsepower to run games at these high resolutions. I'm running a relatively up-to-date ATI Radeon X800 video card with 128MB of memory, and it had no problems whatsoever with plain old Windows programs at the top resolution. But in Doom 3 (a notoriously demanding game), the action was a little choppy at 3,840-by-1,024. I knocked the resolution down to 2,400-by-1,800 (three monitors running at 800-by-600 each, a simple mouse click in the Matrox game-driver setup screen), and things smoothed right out, but that resolution isn't going to appeal to really picky gamers who want the most detail they can squeeze from a screen.

The system works with Nvidia dual-card SLI setups, but there have been reports of problems with ATI CrossFire setups (I didn't have either one available, so I couldn't test multi-card performance through the TripleHead2Go). So in a nutshell, power gamers with a single video card and no intention of upgrading to an SLI machine any time soon will have to decide what's more important - ultra-high resolution on a single screen, or using the TripleHead2Go to get a widescreen view at more conservative resolutions.

The other big consideration is that games weren't developed to run across three screens. As a result, when things like game startup and settings menus were spread across three monitors, the text tended to get split awkwardly between the screens. That made the menus hard to read and use.

The splits between the screens weren't as noticeable when playing a game, but there was one odd effect. I'm not sure if it was the way the graphics are generated by a game or a result of the image tweaking done by the drivers, but the images on the right and left monitors were slightly stretched - the same effect you'd get when looking through a fish-eye camera lens. It was most noticeable if the monitors were placed side by side, with the screens in a line. If I tilted the left and right monitors inwards slightly, giving the setup a bit of a wraparound perspective, the fish-eye effect actually helped give a proper perspective.

I was worried about image quality using the TripleHead2Go, since every time you add more cables and connectors to the signal path between a video source and a monitor, you add elements that will degrade the signal. This signal loss is unavoidable, but in the case of the TripleHead2Go it's minimal. There was no obvious blurring or colour bleed, and no buzzing lines, specks of static or other glaring artifacts - in other words, the image looked pretty much the same to the naked eye whether using the splitter box or a direct video feed from the computer to one of the monitors.

A factor to keep in mind, though, is the monitors you pair the TripleHead2Go with. I used three mismatched CRT monitors, and it worked just fine for Windows XP programs but was pretty jarring for games. LCDs definitely give the best effect, because the plastic casing around the screen tends to be narrow, allowing you to put the monitors close together. That means moving from screen to screen, or spreading game action across three screens, is more "seamless" with LCDs because the split between each of the monitors is less noticeable. If you plan to do some gaming using the TripleHead2Go, I'd strongly recommend a matched set of LCDs.

Overall, the TripleHead2Go is an excellent gadget for desktop power-users who want to increase their desktop space, delivering instant benefits as soon as it's powered up. For power gamers, it's more of an acquired taste and you'll need to invest in some matching screens. But in supported games it gives players a big edge by expanding your window into the virtual gaming world - you'll be able to see a heck of a lot more of your surroundings than the competition can, and that can save your neck when the action gets frenzied.