LCD looks

Style

Not only is LCDC very effective at providing the information you want, but it also does it with style. These are character LCDs, but LCDC does a great job of creating ascii-style art to make things look great. Some LCD screens will just say something like 1GB / 2GB system memory used. With the MX2, it’ll do that while also having a cool bar graph at the bottom. For the network uplink/downlink, the arrows are animated. It’s little things like this that really make the MX2 a line above the rest. If you’re as old-school as me, you might remember ACiD ANSI art packs…

Winamp Spectrum analyzer; you can also customize the look of the bars

Memory Usage

Disk Space Status

Uptime

San Francisco weather

Real-time network performance

This flexibility with point-and-click ease and polish is what truly sets the Matrix Orbital MX2 ahead of its peers. You can get LCD panels that display fan speed or CPU temperatures, or those with fan headers, but MX2 does all that and more than the competition, and is easier to setup. It’s both a toy and a tool.

At ~$100, this is no cheap toy and indeed, the Matrix Orbital MX2 is clearly a luxury item – but you probably expected that. After all, this is supposed to be the ultimate gaming system. However, even at $100 the polish that represents the LCDC/MX2 combo makes it a Bull’s Eye award winner. It’s not going to make your system faster or more stable, but it’s dollar for dollar a better bargain than loading your system up with cold cathodes and multiple windows. I almost feel compelled to give this an Editor’s Choice award since it’s truly special among its peers, but I’ll probably save that until the price goes down. Just in case it’s not clear, we’ve got two different MX2 panels in our labs – the colors are not software selectable.