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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."
why is this news? quad-head and even more head video cards are existing for years now...
Once you've flown just about any Flight Sim on multiple monitors, it's hard to go back to just one. Two is good, but there is the problem of having to deal with the divider in the screen, or living with your view being offset from center. I usually opt to fly with one monitor just offset from the center, and the other looking out one window. Three is much better, because you can center the main monitor and use the two on the sides for side window views. I've used multiple video cards and a product called WidevieW to achieve this. WidevieW allows Microsoft Flight Sim to run on multiple machines in Slave mode so that one machine controls the plane and the others just handle the view.
The difference it makes in flying sims is too big to describe. I know guys who have opted for many more monitors (13 or 19 even) to get a full surround view. I think that 3 or 5 would be gracious plenty.
The cost is not that big a deal, either. Fifteen or seventeen inch flat panel monitors are available for less than $250 each, and can be used on other systems if the multi-monitor setup is not needed all the time.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
I am thinking of the guy with a dual-head video card installing two of these...does that mean that using a dual-head monitor and two of these triple-head adapters, you can run six screens together? That would have to be one heck of a desk to have it all, but I could see the need for this. Better yet, if you hooked this thing up to a Quattro that supports four monitors, do you get 12 monitors for a resolution of 7680x2048? Or would you get 15360x1024?
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
I've got two monitor system at home and 3 pc's hooked up into a KVM switch. Only one machine gets to use the second monitor in the current setup. Even if my other machines had the video output for multiple monitors I wouldn't be able to pipe them all through the kvm switch. Can this device sit outside the kvm switch and allow all three pc's access to both (or even all three if I bought another monitor)? If so this would definitely beat buying video cards that allow 3 monitors (or 2 monitors) for all three pcs. I guess I should RTFA and find out.
I agree that not providing DVI support will certainly dampen this product's future.
However, I have a practical question: is there enough room on the back of a standard PCI card for three DVI ports side-by-side? My workstation graphics card has dual DVI outputs, plus an S-Video port. Even if you took the S-Video port off, there doesn't appear to be enough room for a third DVI connector. I suppose you could do it with mini-DVI ports, such as they have on some laptops (e.g., iBooks) but then you'd need a mini-to-DVI adapter for each screen, and that adds to the cost.
Get yourself 3 projectors and a huge wrap-around screen (hell, white cardboard). VGA is fine on projectors, and you can blend the edges.
Talk about immersive... imagine a driving game on that.
i used to have real estate envy, and car envy
now i suffer from multiple monitor envy
scroll down to the 8 screen, zenview and arena displays, and let your mouth hang open, watering
hmmm, maybe i should rob a bank...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You'll be reducing individual screen resolutions, color depth, or both to account for the memory shortfall on the video card. Just because you can connect a big screen to the card doesn't necessarily mean the card has enough memory to feed it all in 24-bit color.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Especially when they're free. ;)
I was an early adopeter of the Parhelia card, [with 3 19 inch CRTS none the less] and sent it back in under a week.
.. at least its a lot cheaper. still, for $50 you can buy an extra video card.. sure you can't have 180 degree WOW .. but have you ever tried to play WOW across even 2 monitors ?
This box, 4 or 5 years later, is exactly the same thing, low resolution, flickery displays
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
I just bought 3 AOC 19" lcd's from newegg for $200.00US each. they look as good as my expensive Viewsonics and have a better warranty. Couple that with a dirt cheap Nvidia 6600AGP and a 6600PCI and I have 4 head capability with greater resolution capabilities for much much less while able to play any game at full res. (Yes even doom3/quake4 is smooth at full res) Matrox should give up and stay in the industrial 4-12 head video cards and not try to touch the home or media markets.. they simply can not compete.
Problem is that no ID games have been able to do multi-head cince Quake III had a hack to support it.
And flight sim's have sucked for decades because support for multiple PC's in MS flight sim has been missing for a really long time. (I had 4 monitors + 1 for instruments in MS flight sim 4.0 back in college... it was fun abusing the Computer lab!)
I would love to see games or mods use just a second monitor for stats, top down map, etc... but nobody is doing it as less than 10% have more than 1 monitor on their computer... Some games (C&C generals) have major control probmens with multiple monitors because the mouse does not stop at the border and they are using a 1 pixel wide b order for scrolling.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
MS Flight Sim? Pfah! X-Plane kicks its ass. MS just duplicates performance characteristics of planes - X-Plane has a real physics model. Hook it up to simulator hardware and the FAA accepts X-Plane time as simulator hours. Engineers use X-Plane to try out aircraft designs. You can do the same thing yourself, design your own airplanes and fly them. And yeah, I think it has multi-head support.