Date:
Monday , September 24, 2007
Category:
Stuff / Miscellaneous
Manufacturers:
Matrox
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett

Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition

Multi-display gaming has never looked so good. We evaluate the new Matrox TrippleHead2Go Digital Edition which spreads your games across multiple-displays. We will look at features, show screenshots, test performance including SLI, and share our gameplay experiences.

Introduction

We often have the opportunity to evaluate several different types of computer gadgets here at HardOCP. There are many devices we do turn down because they just simply don’t apply to our reader base. Well, we’ve got something exciting right here to show you today which on the surface doesn’t seem like something geared toward our community, but in reality it very much is. We wouldn’t be taking the time to show you this piece of hardware if we didn’t think it deserves a place in the enthusiast gaming community. It comes from a name you wouldn’t typically think caters to the enthusiast crowd today, Matrox.

There was a time that Matrox was better known to the enthusiast, who opted to use its graphics cards for the superior 2D image quality and performance they provided in combination with a secondary 3D accelerator. Though Matrox still has success in the area of 2D image quality and performance they have never been known as a major 3D accelerator player. Matrox did have a somewhat marginal success with their Marvell and Millennium series of video cards. Still, they tried and failed to gain a foothold into the 3D realm competing with the likes of ATI and NVIDIA with their Parhelia series of video cards. These became little more than a joke to the gaming community, but did pique some interest as far as what Matrox was soon to have up their sleeves in other areas.

The Parhelia introduced one unique feature it dubbed “Surround Gaming” using the “TripleHead” technology of the Parhelia video card. TripleHead allowed the video card to output to three displays simultaneously. Surround Gaming was the ability to use those three displays and have your game spread across all three displays. This worked by making the game think it was rendering itself on one large display, while the video card did the actual work of spreading it across the three displays. Since the resolution these games would be running at are very high this needs a powerful video card to render them, and unfortunately the Parhelia just wasn’t powerful enough.

Matrox Graphics eXpansion Modules

The Surround Gaming and TripleHead technology did not die with the Parhelia though; Matrox has improved upon this technology and removed the reliance on their video cards all together by moving this technology into a nice separate module that sits outside your computer. Under the Matrox Graphics division you will find a new brand of devices called Graphics eXpansion Modules (GXM for short).

Matrox GXM are a new line of patent-pending technology that allows users to add multi-display support to a system via external connectivity. GXM are easy-to-use, external, palm-sized boxes that connect to a notebook or desktop PC. Benefit from multi-display computing without having to open the PC chassis.

These new modules do not replace your video card, they cannot provide 3D acceleration, but rather are a means to allow multi-display output and specifically support Surround Gaming. The first two to debut were the DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go. The DualHead2Go is a dual-display analog device, meaning it requires two displays with a VGA connection; DVI is not supported and spreads games across two displays. The TripleHead2Go analog version allows your games to be spread across three analog displays.

While those two devices allowed Surround Gaming, they only worked for standard analog VGA displays; they did not support digital LCDs natively. To cater to the ever growing digital LCD population Matrox has released two brand new graphics expansion modules, the DualHead2Go Digital Edition and TripleHead2Go Digital Edition. These new modules are digital using DVI ports. As the name implies these modules allow games to be spread out across two or three digital displays with DVI (and backwards compatibility with VGA).

Our Goals

On the following page you will find information and pictures of the TripleHead2Go Digital Edition module. We will then explore the drivers and gaming utility software. We want to know if the built in profiles work and if we can use newer games with the module where a profile is not yet present in the software. The software allows customization of new game titles so we will explore this. We then intend to test many games in a triple-display configuration with plenty of screenshots. We will also figure out what the best video card is for the job running at 3840x1024 and if SLI really works or not with triple displays. Read on.