Page 9

The Verdict

Alright then, time for the conclusion. The essence of the TripleHead2Go is extremely simple. It's a relatively cheap to produce box that splits one monitor signal into three. Let me first address the negatives here. The Matroxs TripleHead2Go module will retail for an MSRP of $299 which simply is too expensive. At 149 to 199 USD this product might have a better chance of becoming a success. It seems that Matrox is forgetting that the product is targeted at the consumer market instead of the professional one. This will limit the sales of the product immensely in my opinion.

The second negative that has to be mentioned is the resolution limitation. Although the 1280x1024 resolution times three is colossal, loads of high-end users already switched towards 16x12 or 19x12 screens. It's a bit of a shame to be forced to go back to 12x10 on the monitors. Especially if you own LCD screens and can not play in the native screen resolution. If you do have 12x10 monitors hey .. you are in luck. The X-Factor is just amazing.

The last negative which I hope ATI will resolve is the alarmingly bad support for Radeon graphics cards. Crossfire simply will not work at all. And even if you have bought a 500 USD X1900 XT you will still be limited towards 2400 x 600 vertical pixel lines. That's just not acceptable in my book. Imagine you spend 3x 250 USD on the monitors and 500 on the card, that's 1250 USD alone to see a 600 line vertical pixels limitation (three times 800x600). No sorry, if you own an ATI card then stay away from this solution until ATI actually have support for it.

But now the good stuff ...

This is SERIOUSLY fun gaming. If you have your hardware and budget right you are seriously going to love it. Don't forget you need a high-end graphics card to be able to play games at acceptable framerates as the card need to render 3840x1024 pixels. We tested with a GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB and I really do recommend a card like that or something better. SLi works beautiful also, in fact I highly recommend it as that's where the money shot is. High performance gaming over very high-resolutions in high quality.

Now since you hopefully are using a total resolution of 3840x1024 I must say a thing or two on image quality as you'd be doing a very large signal over three screens over an analog connection. I'm happy to report here that signal quality is Matrox style, very good indeed. We had no weird fuzzy filter effect or anything of any kind. Matrox could do digital DVI if they want to yet went for Analog as that signal itself is a little stronger and is broadly more supported. I do hope to see a DVI-D version one day though as it would probably allow me to go triple 1920x1200 =  5760x1200 :)

Game support for the TripleHead2Go is really not bad at all. With the recent shift towards HR monitors we see very broad support for higher resolutions. Most big titles definitely are or will be supported as game-programmers are as much in love with the product as I am. I mean this thing is really fun. The titles we tested are worked fine, HL2: Lost Coast, Quake 4, F.e.a.r. and my favorite, Age of Empires III, is just stunning to play with three screens. It's amazing how huge the field of view is. Also you'll be surprised to see that if you don't do anything too crazy with AA setting how well games play in terms of framerate.

So in short .. you surely need to invest a lot of money. Right now stick to NVIDIA cards, and make sure you have 1280x1024 screens to get the best out of this niche TripleHead2Go. Once you have these components right you'll be stunned by the surround gaming experience. It's a mountain of fun for any kind of game whether that is a flight-simulator, racing, MMORPG, Strategy or 1st person Shooter. It's an absolutely marvellous experience and comes highly recommended.

More information: Matrox