Windows XP

Setup of the unit was a bit tricky this time around. The Macbook Pro did not allow the use of the Matrox TripleHead2Go as the primary monitor. That setting was simply greyed out in the Display Properties. After a long troubleshooting session, installing the newest NVIDIA drivers with a patched INF did the trick and the needed option became available. Having the newest graphic drivers on a notebook is not as simple as downloading them from the manufacturer website, as most of those are not up to date. After that everything worked flawlessly as you can see, I managed to span a browser across all three displays. Techpowerup.com even works at a resolution of 3840 x 1024 due to it's dynamic width.


The second aspect of such a setup is the use as a large movie screen. The maximum resolution you can get on any mainstream content is 1080p which translates to a resolution of 1900 x 1080 pixels. The image above shows the just released Iron Man trailer in form of a 1080p Quicktime file. While the height was shrunk to 1024 pixels, there is more than enough space left over even with full HD content.

Surround Gaming

A very important feature of the TripleHead2Go series is the fact that you are able to use a SLI or CrossFire system with more than one monitor. Considering the fact that the analog Edition works at 3840 x 1024 resolution, you better have a high-end graphic card or even multi GPU system to get good frame rates.


We chose to use two games to showcase the Surround Gaming environment possible with the TripleHead2Go series. The first is one listed in the SGU application - Neverwinter Nights 2. Once you have installed the game, the utility will patch the game's configuration file to accomodate for the massive screen real estate. It works great, but due to the GeForce 8600 GT, the game did not run smoothly. Expect a current Dual Core system with a Radeon HD 2900 or GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra to perform good enough for smooth game play.

The increased viewing angle you gain in the game is simply stunning and you will not want to go back to just a third of that on a normal system after getting used to this setup.


Considering the quite extensive, but still limited list of games, the question arises if the Matrox TripleHead2Go will also work on modern titles. Bioshock was just released and has become a huge success. It utilizes the Unreal Engine and can be considered state of the art. Even though the game is not officially supported with the Matrox SGU, setting the 3840 x 1024 resolution worked like a charm. The game recognized the three displays as one large unit and the game looks great as well. The notebook managed to crank out around 2 FPS with this setup. Any modern game, which does not use fixed resolution, but accepts whatever is available from the monitor, should work with the TripleHead2Go. Microsoft, ATI and NVIDIA encourage game developers to develop titles that will run independent of display resolution.

Mac OS X

Setting up the unit on Mac OS X is done exacly as it was the case with the DualHead2Go Digital. You also need to set the resolution in the Mac OS manually first, without the GXM utility provided by Matrox. The displays do not become active if you do not do so, even if the correct resolution is set in the GXM utility. Spanning the Techpowerup.com website across all three displays with Opera or Safari is not a problem at all and you have the exact same resolution available as you would in Windows.


You may also place different applications on different displays. As you can see above, the leftmost display holds Opera, followed by iTunes, the Ironman trailer and a finder window on the Macbook Pro itself.