Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition

Rob Williams

Rob Williams

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With the digital edition of the TripleHead2Go, hooking up three LCD's via DVI and VGA is possible. This allows you to drastically increase your desktop space and/or improve your gaming. Best of all, you don't need to add a second GPU, and not even an additional power outlet is required!

You can read Greg's full review here and discuss it here!
 
Rob Williams

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
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gml_josea said:
I can't imagine my room's desktop with three displays. Two is nice...three seems way too overwhelming...
Click to expand...

Ahh, a man who dislikes his ménage à trois. Kidding, I'm with you. I'd rather one really large monitor over three smaller ones, but each person has specific needs/wants.
 
U

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Hi

It would have been nice to have seen some actual pictures of the monitors setup displaying games :)

Regards :)
 
Greg King

Greg King

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Unregistered... I agree and apologize for not including any. By the time I got to the writing of the review, it had been about a month since I did the testing. Check out the last page of my TH2Go Analog review, I have pics there. That said, I will work to get some pics up by next week.

Thanks for the comments and sorry for the omission.
 
Greg King

Greg King

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Also, to comment on what everyone else has said...


Merlin, its a toy. A great toy but a novelty none the less.

gml_josea, I use two monitors at work and can never go back. Productivity is great with dual monitors.

Rob, your a ball bag and I agree with you. I would rather game on my 24" LCD but when I need to work, like write reviews for your slave driving ass, the three monitors can not be beat... unless I had 4 monitors. Hmmm.... are you listening Matrox?
 
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U

Unregistered

Guest
TH2Go Digital - OS support ?

I'm guessing from the report that the display settings are only available on Windows - or am I missing something ? If not, do you happen to know what other options are available for setup, e.g. via a web interface... the screen shots that were posted seem to indicate that the interface is trivial in requirements so it's (only slightly) surprising that an effort has been made to code for a specific platform (whatever that may be).

Cheers
Tim
 
U

Unregistered

Guest
Did you find a way to search for or add a Cfg file for a game not in the list. I participate in game beta's a lot. I could not find any info on setting up your own file and could only browse or search for games in the list.
 
D

dawsmit

Obliviot
Hey - does this device require that all external monitors connected be of the same resolution, size, etc., or can they be all different?
 
Greg King

Greg King

I just kinda show up...
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Dawsmit,

Thanks for posting. I haven't used the TH2Go for many months now but I know that the software has not evolved to the point that what you are asking is possible. How it works is that the actual TripleHead2Go tricks the computer into thinking that it's connected to one large resolution display. Your three monitors much be the same resolution in order to have a supported resolution across two or three monitors.

I hope that you find this helpful.
 
U

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Will it work on triple 1920x1200?

Hi Rob,

Very nice review. Quick question though. I currently have three 24" monitors and they have a native resolution of 1920x1200. Two of them are connected on one ATI HD video card and the other one is connected to the onboard video of the motherboard (ATI HD also). The ATI Hydravision software is taking care of the triple monitor management.

I do about 75% desktop work (programming, office, etc.) and only 25% 3D gaming, and working in the native resolution of 1920x1200 x 3 is actually very productive for me.

Since you mentioned that the TH2Go can go up to 3840x1024, that would mean each of my screen would have to scale down to 1280x1200 each, right? This is the one that's been bugging me. I really would like to play 3D games that spans 3 monitors and I don't mind if its 3840x1024 resolution. But when I go back to desktop mode, I would like it to be the native resolution of [1920x1200] x 3 = [5760x1200].

I hope I'm making sense here. I really like the product, but I'm having second thoughts because my resolution for each monitor would go down significantly. Your thoughts?


Thanks!
 
U

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Hi. Nice Review. I'm definitely going to buy one of these!
Just wanted to leave a comment. Lots of posters in forums and on youtube videos say that gaming on a 24" or 30" offers much the same experience as spanning across three screens, and other people have said they're happy with just a 24". I just wanted to point out that playing on three monitors isn't the same as having a really big screen - that is, with one monitor, you see the same image, regardless of the size of that one monitor. So a 19" shows the same game world as a 30", only different size in front of you. With the TH2GO, most games are made Horizon +. What this means is that 'additional' content is added to the sides when you add the other two monitors - you get what people see on their one monitor, plus you get what is to the sides of that view as well. You actually see stuff that you can't see on a single monitor, no matter how big the monitor, because it is beyond the view of the monitor. Ie, in a flight sim, instead of only seeing across the front dashboard on one monitor, you can also see out the side windows at the same time, with three monitors. So really, the equivalent of the game experience of three 19" monitors and TH2Go, made bigger, is having 3 x 24" or 3 x 30" monitors and a TripleHead2Go :)
 
S

Shischkabob

Obliviot
Is there anyway that I can hook up my playstation 3, xbox 360, or wii using this technology? I am going to guess not being that I would probably need the windows or mac operating system. Anyways though, does anyone know of anyone that has done so or if it is even possible?
 
U

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Is there a future for triplehead2go?

I have to ask if the triplehead2go is dying technology. Firstly, as far as I can tell it cannot be used for triple monitor gaming on the likes of Xbox360 or Playstation 3. Secondly, on a PC the large resolution required for triple monitors requires a powerful graphic card system to drive it. Most of the latest PC graphic cards can either drive 3 monitors from a single card or from a set of linked cards. Once you have these graphic cards in your PC the triplehead2go is redundant. Thirdly, one of the most popular screen resolutions on monitors and larger LCD TVs is 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels) and the triplehead2go does not support these resolutions. The horizontal resolution is about half that, so each pixel from the game would be stretched across two pixels on a wide screen display causing distortion of perspective. So it seems the triplehead2go was a stop gap solution that came out before the major PC graphic card manufacturers got their act together and started supporting more than dual monitors and the triplhead2go is now more or less redundant technology. The only useful application for the device that I can see, is if you have a very old office laptop or PC with little scope for internal expansion and have no intention of doing any serious gaming.
 
marfig

marfig

No ROM battery
Unregistered said:
I have to ask if the triplehead2go is dying technology.
Click to expand...

I think your arguments concerning gaming are valid. But TripleHead2Go has been having quite an impact on presentation screens. Just recently attended a WinRT seminar and there you had TripleHead2Go serving a Metro 8 application across 3 large screens.

Concerning games, I'm unsure though. For a technology that's been around for 5 years and never actually got obsolete, I'd have trouble qualifying it as "dying". If anything it needs to be replaced. Which it hasn't yet. So far games are still largely developed for single monitors and this has been the problem in adopting these technologies (it's not just Matrox that needs to justify multi-screen gaming technologies, NVidia and AMD have provided solutions too that never seen any widespread adoption).

What I agree is that stretching a GPU output across multiple screens is NOT the desirable solution.The trend has to start --- in my modest opinion -- on the software industry by developing multi-Screen capable 3D applications. Only then I'm ready to fully agree TripleHead2Go has become obsolete.

You have to consider this... if Matrox had half the weight of yesteryear, it could have lobbied (aka, spent money on) software developers into supporting higher resolutions. And you would have a very different concept of TripleHead2Go at this point. That is, the technology is useful. It's just not being used.
 
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