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Matrox TripleHead Triples Your Viewing Pleasure
mikemuch writes "Matrox brings one of the coolest features of its Parhelia graphics card--the ability to drive three monitors--to any setup through a little VGA box. ExtremeTech has a review of the Matrox TripleHead2Go up. The review is pretty positive, the immersion in games and extra productivity area are a definite boon, but there are drawbacks: First of all, three hi-res monitors will set you back some serious dough, also there are some compatibility issues with ATI GPUs, and you may get a little vertigo while surrounded by your WoW world."
If you have the room for three 19" CRTs, they're dirt cheap nowadays. Even LCDs have come down in price a lot - 17" and 19" LCDs are generally 1280x1024, and you can easily find cheap 19" LCDs for under CAD$300 (and decent ones around $350). Not all three monitors need to be identical... I'd suggest a quality monitor in the middle (since it'll be used the most), and cheaper ones on the sides.
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Many of you might not know it, but Matrox has become hard to deal with when it comes to open source OS support.
Matrox Parhelia open source drivers are badly needed! Since Parhelia was introduced something happened at Matrox and now they are not willing to do co-operation with open source people. Open source world has needed bug free, up to date Parhelia drivers for years, but without success.
I'm writing this right now on a FreeBSD box that uses VESA driver to display X graphics. Would be damn nice to finally be able to use my video card properly. I own Matrox Millenium P650 AGP.
There's one guy who provides up to date drivers to Linux community. You can find his unofficial Parhelia drivers here. He's a regular contributor at Matrox Technical Support Forums, but does not belong to Matrox staff.
It's news because it's not a card. It's a box that you can attach to almost VGA card, but you would know that if you had RTFA, or even the summary.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I can see this being pretty useful while coding. I usually have more than one source file open at a time. More desktop real estate can come in handy.
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A bunch of games support this and the list grows.
n g/list.cfm
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/offhome/th2go/gami
Of course, these things are NOT seen as three different monitors. This means that you have to have support from the game to put the side views on the single monitor. I doubt many flight sims are capable of that, although there are so many add-ins for MS flight sim that this may just be that one exception.
I've been using the dualhead2go for about 4 months now. I hang it off my lappy and run trip heads and frankly, I can't live without it. Takes a little mucking to get it working right with Linux but it's well worth it. One note, I've attempted to get this working under FC5 with Xorg.7.0 and no luck. The accelerated ATI drivers aren't working well with it either, but the radeon drivers with Xorg.6.8 work great. To anyone with spare monitors, I highly recommend it.
TFA actually includes a nice little picture showing you can adjust these settings.
Dont use the Matrox solution for what you want. Get a couple Nvidia cards with dual DVI output. You have the option for 3 or 4 independent screens, or to combine all of them into one. This way, you can maximize a window to a single monitor, but then you can still drag a window from one monitor to another or have it span between two monitors if you want.
DVI is a solution in search of a problem.
Then, no offense, but you either use so much higher quality displays than the rest of us that you can't fairly compare the two, or you've never used an LCD display.
Not a solution in search of a problem, DVI removes exactly such a beast - Namely, removing an D2A2D path that compensates for a digital device trying to maintain backward compatibility with old analogue (CRT) displays. Yes, newer flat panels do a pretty good job of autosyncing - But particularly if you use ClearType (or whatever your preferred platform calls its version of subpixel sampling), you can see the difference even on high-quality analogue displays (most people complain about this as either moire or color-fringed text).
Now, a bit more on-topic, I have a very serious problem with this device... While a neat idea, it seems to me that:
1) Few video cards support a 3840x1024 output device, and
2) A pair of GF6600s, giving quad DVI out up to 2048x1536 per panel, costs half as much.
Considering that, why would anyone buy this? Okay, someone mentioned the laptop market - But I have a pretty kickass Latitude less than a year old, and it won't drive anything above 1920 (I suppose it might go to 2048 if I manually hacked the timing, but 1920 pushes the available video bandwidth). Incidentally, for everyone wondering why Matrox didn't use DVI, I just gave the answer... DVI has a bandwidth of 165MHz, into which a mode of 2048x1200@60Hz using CV-RB just barely squeezes. At 3840x1024@60Hz (again using CV-RB), you need 252.8MHz - Or looking at it from a different direction to make it work, you'd need a refresh rate of 36Hz. If that doesn't cause eye-bleedyness, I don't know what would.
The article notes that the device has software fixes for the games to support the 3 display mode. World of Warcraft is one of the games they tested with it and they said it ran fine (unlike Oblivion which was slow).
Maybe Chuck Norris was using this product.
Sometimes my arms bend back.