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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."
I'd really like to see more games support multiple monitors. I have a bunch that dont and only support up to 1280x1024.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
In the days of DVI connectors, this product is DOA. It uses VGA connectors only. 3840x1024 outta analog VGA is going to look .. umm.. less than perfect.
Besides, with sli/crossfire board setups you can already get three screens with DVI - even with 1600x1200 displays, and couple of dual DVI 6600s are not that much more expensive than this thingy. The only thing this has going for is that it's external, so it works for laptops.
This is Matrox once again playing the 'stuff for 3-screen stock market gamblers'-market. Same as with parhelia - most common use for Parhelia in the real world was by stock traders who wanted their three screens full of graphs and stuff. They can't get Parhelia sold to laptops (Which are the New Toy of the stock gamblers), so they made an external triple head thingy, so you can bring your laptop to your desk, stick in this and turn on your three screens of crappy fuzzy picture and look like a l33t stock market specialist.
However, I wonder at what point this becomes no more beneficial. I could foresee finding uses for three monitors in a work environment (although less frequently than I utilize two monitors). But four monitors? Five?
At some point, its got to become more difficult to keep track of where you've put everything than the efficiency of having everything available warrants.
I can understand the benefit in games with immersive environments. I've played many a game where I would have enjoyed having three or more monitors in front of me, all useful to the game itself, but as far as productivity applications go, there's got to be a limit. More can't always be better.
And then there's the...other...application. Will Slashdotters soon find themselves utilizing three whole monitors of porn? I know I like to keep my monitors having screenfulls of fluffy bunnies and puppies.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
For me, at least, the monitors have to be identical, as subtle color shifts between different monitors become especially evident when using a multimon setup. It's annoying when one monitor's 9300K differs from another's. It's also nice to have identical bezel widths, so that windows transition properly from one monitor to another.
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You get used to it. I set up a Sharp Aquos 45" as my desktop
monitor. Sitting 3ft away from it gives a pretty immersive
view of games running at 1920x1080i. I was a little sick to
the stomach at first, but it soon passed. Now playing World
of Warcraft on anything else feels like peering into another world through
a keyhole.
I also find that with a big monitor, I don't hunch over the desk anymore
to make out the letters. My neck and back problems have dissapeared.
Bigger is better.
To be truely immersive with three monitors, they should probably be
in the 24" wide size. Three tiny little 17" or 19" monitors won't
cut it. Or better yet, mount three projectors to a rail, line up
the edges where the picture meets, and you have a really cool wrap-around
experience!