Computers Have Taken Over: Two Heads and TV Too!
This week, Truly Obscure will be featuring computer stuff- much of it the latest and greatest, most of it aimed at “enthusiasts” or “gamers” and other people who care way too much about their hardware specs. We realize this is a departure from our normal fare, and hope you enjoy this feature, as we take a look at everything from RAM to TV tuner and dual graphics devices to cases, cooling systems, and uninterpretable power supplies.
If one monitor is great, will two monitors make your work or play twice as good/fast/easy? Matrox, basically the go-to people for this sort of thing, sent us their DualHead2Go, and we finally were able to watch television on one screen and do our work on the other- without a TV (and more on the TV part in a bit)!
The box isn’t exactly sexy- but it is easy to use. Simply take one VGA input and direct it to two outputs. Unfortunately, there isn’t support for DVI or anything fancy like that, but seeing as this product is aimed at laptop users and not gamers the quite-common VGA should work fine. Also, you can continue to use your laptop monitor in addition, giving you three screens to work with if you need them!
The cost of two 17 inch screens is less than many 20” panels and offers more space, and this unit adds only $160 to the price. It’s light and small, but does require an extra power supply be connected. Basically, the Matrox DualHead2Go it’s perfect if you want to edit movies, trade your stocks, or edit your fancy graphics on the road- otherwise an internal card might better suit you.
On the other hand, if you have a desktop machine and Windows Media Center, you’ll want a TV tuner card to make use of the fancy features Microsoft has included. The AverMedia Purity MCE 250 is a PCI-card (meaning you’ll need to open up your case), and requires Media Center Edition at this time. These drawbacks are lessened though by the low cost ($60 as of the publication date) and the range of features on offer (including FM tuning, a nice antenna, and RCA inputs). Best of all, the image quality (sharpness and color balance) was excellent, comparable with any other card around this range. The card runs cool, and since most of the decoding action happens on board the card, you won’t see the drops in performance that some other software-based cards cause.
The Avermedia Purity MCE 250 isn’t perfect- it lacks high-def support, and will not work on other operating systems. But it’s a great solution if you are thinking of building or upgrading your media center.
