Matrox DualHead in General

DualHead

Enter Matrox. When they debuted their G400 series of cards earlier this year, a lot of people focused on the speed and how it was supposed to take on Voodoo 3 and TNT2 at their own game. Other people marveled at how good environmental bump mapping looked. It never ceased to puzzle me that the feature I thought was most important to the product, DualHead, was downplayed and relatively overlooked in the press.

A vanilla G400

What is DualHead? DualHead is the feature on the G400 and G400 Max card that allows you to hook up two displays to the same card! With DualHead, there's no need to spend extra money on a second video card and use up one of your precious PCI slots. You can see that the G400 cards (at least the retail ones) all have two monitor plugs right on the board. This allows you to plug in a number of different combinations of monitors, televisions, analog flat panels and digital flat panels (for digital flat panel you need a Matrox flat panel daughter card) into the card.

A G400 Max

The configurations

So you're probably asking "who the heck wants to buy two monitors?" Monitors are rather expensive, and in many instances, the monitor can actually be more expensive then the entire rest of the system! The fact is that most people don't need to go out and buy another monitor to take advantage of DualHead. There are a lot of people out there who have upgraded their monitor to a larger one and have a perfectly good 14" or 15" monitor (or even a 17" one) lying around gathering dust. Why let that old monitor go to waste or sell it for peanuts at a garage sale when you can put it to work on your new system? Also you can use a television as the second display - almost everyone has an extra TV set lying around. Matrox DualHead supports all the following display configurations, with primary display listed first, and secondary next:

• Monitor + monitor
• Monitor + TV
• Monitor + analog flat panel
• Monitor + digital flat panel (with daughter card)
• analog flat panel + monitor
• analog flat panel + TV
• analog flat panel + analog flat panel
• analog flat panel + digital flat panel (with daughter card)

One of the cool things about DualHead is that each monitor can have its own resolution and color depth. Keep in mind that the primary display can go up to a whopping 2048x1536 (if your monitor is good enough to handle that), but the secondary display is limited to 1280x1024, no matter how advanced your secondary display is. Before running out and grabbing a pair of high end 21" monitors to go with your G400, just remember that the second monitor will be stuck at 1280x1024.

That's how my monitors are aligned

If I moved the IBM to the left...

Left/Right? Right/Left?

The drivers allow you to specify the physical position of your two displays so that you know which way to move your mouse to access the secondary display. For example, if your monitors are set left/right, with your secondary to the right of your primary, then you're going to want your mouse to scroll off to the right of your primary display onto the secondary. If your secondary is to the left of your primary monitor, then moving your mouse to the left should pop you over to the secondary display. Matrox even allows you to specify your displays as stacked one on top of the other!

How about if I stack them?