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Massive Gains in Screen Real-Estate by Sam Garfield
Email boxes around the world fill up every day with messages promising "massive gains." Not only are these emails annoying, they don't target the kind of gains the average computer junkie really wants: screen real-estate. There's nothing quite like sitting up in the middle of the night bathed in pure, clean, digital light while you toil away at whatever it is you toil away at.
In recent years, a major shift has taken place in home computers. More people are buying portable notebook computers and less desktops. Although this improved the versatility of what can be done with a computer, some things are given up in exchange. For example, screen size, keyboard size, a real mouse, expandability options, etc.
A lot of these problems are simple to solve. An external keyboard and mouse can keep hands from going crazy and cramping up until they are no longer recognizable. Many expandability options available as PCI cards are also available as PCMCIA or ExpressCards. There is even such a thing as an external PCI enclosure, although they're not particularly cheap.
The only place you run into real problems in expanding a notebook computer is when you want to add displays. If a notebook computer doesn't come with an extra DVI or VGA port, you're are just out of luck, right? Fortunately, no, you're not out of luck.
Recent advances in display driver technology have made it possible to expand the maximum number of potential displays on a notebook computer by using a specialized adapter. These adapters come in two flavors (not counting the external PCI enclosure): PCMCIA Cards and VGA Adapters.
PCMCIA External monitor card are made by Village Tronic. A VTBook plugs right into your PCMCIA port and gives you a DVI-I port to which you can connect an external monitor. An optional Y-Cable allows you to connect yet another monitor. If your computer comes equipped with an external VGA or DVI port, you can connect yet another monitor on top of that! This results in four displays total - two from the VTBook, one from the notebook's VGA or DVI port, and your notebook's native display.
VTBooks are a great solution if you have a PCMCIA port and need lots of displays. But what if you're looking for something a little more simple? A company called Matrox makes a similar adapter that is both cheaper and effective. This is the DualHead2Go or TripleHead2Go adapter.
Unlike the VTBook, the adapters from Matrox use your computer's existing display processor to drive additional displays. Basically, the computer is tricked into thinking only one additional display is attached - even though that display has an insanely high width. The DualHead2Go takes care of the rest by splitting the signal in half and arranging the picture on both displays.
Matrox has gone the extra mile by including software to help you adjust image quality, window management, and more. A short cable is included in the package to connect the adapter to your computer, and then existing cabling can be used from each monitor that you want to connect.
The DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go adapters from Matrox do exactly like it sounds - give you two additional screens or three additional screens, respectively. Thus, you can achieve the same four monitor setup as the VTBook. The one drawback is that all these extra monitors will be seen as a single monitor by your computer. This can be a pain if your monitors are drastically different in size.
The DualHead2Go supports resolutions of up to 2560x1024. Remember, the width is split between two monitors. That means you could have two monitors each with a resolution of up to 1280x1024. The TripleHead2Go supports resolutions up to 3840x1024, giving you three external monitors at 1280x1024 each.
The main advantage of the Matrox adapter over the VTBook is that the Matrox adapter will allow you to play games across multiple monitors. Because your computer sees the external monitors as one display, video from a game will be sent to the full resolution of that display. The DualHead2Go or TripleHead2Go does the rest by splitting the video game into the two or three external displays.
This is great for immersive game-play and especially first-person shooters. Because there is some space between the monitors, the best setup for gaming is to use the TripleHead2Go. A game will appear on the middle screen and players can look left or right on either of the side screens.
Because games will normally not natively allow their window to be stretched across multiple screens, this type of gaming is impossible with the VTBook or even a PCI Card on a desktop computer.
Each type of card has its advantages and it's important to consider what type of setup you need. For gamers, the Matrox adapter is a sure win. For business people, either adapter will work, and one may be better than the other depending on what type of things you normally work with (design, spreadsheets, documents, web, etc.).
With a little bit of work and a little bit of money, soon you can have computer monitors filling your entire field of vision. This has been proven not only to increase your productivity, but it's sure to impress your friends too.
About the Author
Sam Garfield is a product manager for display adapters at Sewell Direct. He covers both the Matrox (http://sewelldirect.com/Matrox) and VTBook (http://sewelldirect.com/vtbookpcmciacard.asp) adapters and typically works on a four-display workstation himself. |
