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Matrox’s TripleHeadToGo—Digital edition

Those cunning Montrealites have extended their external frame buffer manager into the digital domain and now have a DVI version of it.

Shown in the picture is the PC side of the unit, and it also has a VGA input connector since most laptops don’t offer a DVI connector.

Figure 1: Matrox’s TripleHeadToGo Digital Edition. (Source: Matrox)

The unit looks like a giant second monitor to your PC and can drive an image up to 3840 x 1024 (if you have enough frame buffer memory to support it). That works out to be the equivalent of three 1280 x 1024 screens. That’s the good news. The bad news, if there is any with this nifty little device, is that it is a contiguous second monitor in terms of the GDI and your mouse movements. That’s not a handicap if you use this as your primary monitor on a PC or workstation, and place the three displays next to each other on the desk. It does become a problem if you use it as the second display, say with a laptop. The problem is the fourth monitor gets so far away from you that, unless you have amazingly good eyes, you’re going to have to move your head, or maybe your body to see what’s on the furthermost-away screen.

My preferred setup is to have screens on either side of my laptop, and if there is a fourth have it above the laptop’s screen so there is a cone of focus around the keyboard basically allowing quick eye movements and limited head movement.

And although you can physically place the displays in any arbitrary location moving the mouse, and moving it quickly, becomes almost impossible as you search for the right direction to go.

In the test configuration shown in the photo on the next page, the two screens (laptop and extended external second screen) are configured with the external above the laptop screen.

Figure 2: Matrox’s TripleHeadToGo enables three external screens with a laptop. (Source: JPR)

However, once you work out your mousing around, which can with a little time simply be a matter of training, you can get a lot of screen and pixel real -estate with this nifty little device.

We tested previous versions of the device, the two-head VGA and the three-head VGA, and those puppies got really hot and used an external power supply. This new digital box powers off of USB and runs very cool.

Playing around

One of the original drivers for this multi-head display work was games, back in 2002 when at E3 they showed their G550 chip on an AIB that could run games with three displays. It was revolutionary, affordable, and limited at the time by the high cost of monitors, and to some extent the openness of the games. Matrox had to write special drivers for each game to tweak its display size.

Since then the games have been more open, monitors have dropped in price, and the TripleHeadToGo is now a very affordable three-head game display device. Also, Matrox has greatly expanded the list of games it can work with. We plan to test this in the coming weeks; getting the monitors physically set up is not trivial.

Seeing even more

Now that Matrox has a digital version, it will be interesting to see if they continue to expand it. The two black framed screens in the photo are a 1600 x 1200 and a 1680 x 1050 (which is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for notebooks and affordable large screens because it fits well with HD TV requirements). If the native resolution of your screens is 1680 x 1050 then running them at 1280 x 1024 does cause a little distortion and of course larger pixels. With improved bandwidth (from DVI) Matrox should be able to bring out yet another version of this clever little box.

Conclusion

There is lots of value for users, a small cost offset to the cost of monitors, and easy to install. The major competition is the USB to DVI technology from Displaylink that is being employed in displays and docking devices. The bottom line on all of this is we are going to be able to do more by seeing more for not a lot of money. The unit sells for a mere $329 and should be available by the time you read this.

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