TripleHead2Go: Review

Posted by Peter on Apr 10, 2011 in Apple, Featured, Reviews, Technology | Comments Off

When I first joined Healthscreen, I was given a dual monitor AMD x64 Dual Core box with about 3GB of ram running a Fedora 9 distro.  I initially had a lot of trouble setting up the graphics card to handle the dual monitors it was running, trying various drivers, but eventually got it to work with the help of some pretty smart people and a lot of google searches.  That was around 2008 and 2009.

That box hadn’t aged well and, given that I have recently purchased an excessively awesome MBP (8GB, 256GB SSD drive…I said it was excessive), I figured I’d make the switch over to my personal laptop and drop the linux box.  The one reservation I had however was in getting multiple monitor support.

Enter the TripleHead2Go from Matrox.

It looked very promising: it has support for the mini display port; it promised to bring a triple monitor solution to the table; and the price wasn’t totally outrageous.

I read up more on it and learned about it’s limitations:

• You’ll want to use three identical monitors or it’s pretty much a mess.
• The device will not identify your screens as separate monitors but rather treats them as one large monitor.
• It was a bit picky on the order in which it was plugged in and wasn’t totally responsive sometimes.

So I bought one and grabbed a third monitor to add to my existing 2 LG widescreen displays and waited patiently.

When the box finally arrived, I was glad that I had read all of the details and had already purchased the mini display port to display port adapter which wasn’t included.  What I didn’t read however was that the MBP couldn’t output three monitors in widescreen configuration.  Shoot.  Out go the three LG monitors and in come 3 standard display ones.  Final resolution: 3 X 1280 x 1024 which is the maximum that this device can put out from an MBP.

The second thing that I had to work around was how fussy the box was.  It’s like some bratty 4 year old.  Sometimes it picks up right away, sometimes it just doesn’t want to do anything.  It doesn’t help that I run with my MBP lid closed.  But still, to say this device is  “plug and display” ready is a real exaggeration.  Don’t get me wrong.  When it works, it works great.  But I’ve sat around unplugging and plugging in cables enough already to stretch out my patience to the limit.

My common Divvy configurations

The third thing that I hadn’t really anticipated was the nature of running multiple monitors on a mac.  Mac OS X has an obvious dislike for the concept of multiple monitors.  To bridge the gap, I found a really slick little program called Divvy.  This neat little app is basically a window re-sizing application.  Press a key combination and you can quickly resize a window to a particular region of your monitor.  Well, if you setup Divvy to use three identically sized regions and add some global shortcuts, you get some pretty fast multi monitor support real fast for mac.

I actually find that I enjoy the keyboard shortcut MORE than I miss the OS being able to drag and drop a window into a physical display and have it maximize immediately.

All of this goes out the window if your monitors aren’t the same size of course.  But if you’ve done as recommended and picked up three identical displays, it works pretty well.

There are other frustrating things about the solution such as when switching away from the triple monitors back to your laptop display, windows are totally messed up and often hidden almost from view.  But that’s a minor thing in order to get what you get from the solution.  I have also replaced one of the cables that appears to have been faulty.  Again, not much of a deal breaker there.