Matrox TripleHead2Go test

Software

As pointed out before, Windows recognizes the TripleHead2Go as a plug and play monitor and the supported resolutions are available from the Display Settings immediately. Naturally it is possible to use just one monitor in 2D use. If 800x600, 1024x768 or 1280x1024 are chosen, for example, the image is displayed -as it should- only on the centre monitor.

But if one has three monitors lined up for gaming anyway, they can of course be used for 2D purposes as well. The extra desktop space means that you can run several programs side by side without trouble, and once one is used to multiple monitors, it’s impossible to go back to a single one. Although the three monitors work without the installation of additional software, it is not very practical. This is largely due to Windows seeing the three monitors as a single screen and maximizing windows means stretching them across all three monitors. Matrox provides software to solve this problem: when this PowerDesk-SE software is installed, it can be set to maximize windows only in the screen they are in. This is the same functionality as hooking up two monitors to two connections on a videocard. With the TripleHead2Go and three 19 inch monitors, once can create a larger desktop than with one 30 inch monitor, and that for about half the price!

Gaming

It’s all well and good, displaying Windows on three monitors, but this is a product for gamers, and so gaming will be the primary reason for buying the TripleHead2Go. Matrox supplies the user with a special Surround Gaming Utility, which is a program that contains a large number of game presets that configure the game in question for optimal use of three monitors. A complete list of the supported games can be found here on the Matrox website .

The utility does this by editing the configuration files of the supported games and thereby changing the resolution as well as in many cases the Field of View (FOV). The FOV determines how many degrees in width the view of the gamer is, and with the use of three monitors, this has to be changed to three times the original width. Some games also work perfectly without intervention of the Surround Gaming Utility, while others are incompatible with the wide aspect ratio and high resolutions that TripleHead2Go requires. Though a complete list of supported game titles can be found here, this list is not by definition complete. In our case the demo of the new race game GTR2 worked perfectly on three monitors even though the software does not officially support this new game.

Gaming experience

It is difficult to find words to describe the effect of gaming with three monitors. The added viewing area really does add an extra dimension and gives the gamer a clear advantage against competitors in some games. In first person shooters enemies can be seen approaching from the sides much sooner, and in racing games the positioning of other vehicles around you becomes much clearer. Compare the experience with viewing the world through a tube versus regular vision. The center image does not change, but the sides gain a world of extra information. The pictures featured below give an impression of the experience and as a bonus we have placed a video on the final page of this review to show how TripleHead gaming works in practice. We should make note of a functional issue of gaming in this fashion: because a games does not “know” that three monitors are being addressed, the menus and onscreen (HUD) information is not only displayed on the center screen, but is stretched out over all three screens. Especially for navigating menus, this side effect can be a chore, but in a 3D environment the symptoms are largely unseen, apart from a slight warping of on-screen overlays like crosshairs and score bars. Patches from the game developers and new configuration files from Matrox could provide a solution, but a perfect result is not always guaranteed.

GTR2 Demo:

System requirements

We tested the TripleHead2Go on an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ system with two NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT videocards, both in SLI and single modes. Most games ran well without SLI in 3840x1024 as long as we did not activate anti-aliasing or keep it at just 2x. If higher anti-aliasing settings are desired, the performance rapidly drops, and SLI becomes a necessity. Naturally the detail settings in many games can be altered to maintain a high framerate.

What is important when a TripleHead setup is used is the use of identical monitors. For this test we used two Acer monitors and one from Iiyama, and even though the specifications are very similar, a clear difference can be perceived. To make sure that the transition from one monitor to the other does not show differences in clarity, colour and viewing angle, it is highly recommended to acquire three monitors of the same brand and type.