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The Verdict

Now this surely is a fun gadget. An absolute must for true case modders, LAN freaks and HTPC builders. Quality of the display is awesome. No slowdowns, good refresh rate, clear display and high contrast. All in all very good. The product itself has been built at very high quality. It's sturdy and definitely was taken good care of while building. The fun factor is really high here. A few downsides I think are firstly the LCDC software. Don't get me wrong as it is very versatile and probably the best software available. Yet it's too user unfriendly and not exactly gorgeous to the eyes. But hey, you probably will fool around with it no more than 15 minutes and after it has been setup properly you'll never have to configure it again, unless a new fun plug-in is available.

A second downside has to be the pricing range. The older series MX5 of the product line still costs 150 bucks. LUCKILY you can expect this puppy to cost roughly 110 USD/75 EUR, which in all honesty still is a lot of money for a display/fan controller and might be out of range for most of you. But hey, this is hand-made equipment, which is using pretty expensive PLED technology and a bunch of features that are just breathtaking. Go buy a Coolermaster fan controller at 60 bucks and then compare it with this product, this one will win undoubtedly for many reasons. I was surprised to see the pricing lower then the MX5 series, very nice.

Update -  thanks to Mike newhall we got some more information that caught my attention. One very interesting but less known feature overlooked in the article is the technology used for the temperature probes.  Actually it is a digital bus, not like most analog sensors.  The first advantage is that temperature information can be transmitted over long lengths of wire with zero loss, without regard to the properties of the wire itself that can affect analog temperature readings.  It's actually like a network, with each device having a unique ID, two-way communication, and an almost unlimited amount of devices on the bus.  It's called the Dallas One Wire Bus (after Dallas Semiconductor, the inventors).

Practically speaking, one implication is that with some trivial wiring, one can support any number of temperature probes.  The four ports on the back are actually not separate busses, they are wired together into a single bus already.  It's easy to extend this bus to support more probes and measure every aspect of one's case.

The second implication is that there are digital power controllers available, so one can hang any number of fan controllers off the One Wire bus -- one is not limited to just the three fan plugs on the back (these devices can control cold cathode lights, etc. as well).

Less PC-related but still interesting is that there are other types of sensors and devices available, like a humidity sensor.  One can build a mini weather station off the One Wire bus (one company actually sold a pre-built weather station using DOW parts).  The bus can transmit signals hundreds of feet / many meters, so one could even put temperature and humidity etc. probes outside in one's backyard and truly have live local weather reporting, in addition to the over-the-Internet weather the MX displays can show.

The product is available in several flavors (colors/buttons), we tested the MX610. You can click on the product images to visit the info page at the Matrix Orbital website.

If we forget about pricing and purely look at the product then I can undeniably recommend it. It's the most fun you'll ever get from a display ever and you can use it for many situations, case-mods, LAN Fragfest "coolness", Home Theater PC and so on. The ease of use and flexibility make it incredibely fun. Next to that the build quality is just awesome. Whether you are playing game or are looking at the weather forecast or system load it doesn't matter, the Matrix Orbital MX610 is a really fun display and quite frankly the best I've ever owned.

More info? Go to matrixorbital.com