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Despite the pitfalls of the MD230X3, we weren’t convinced that multiscreen bliss couldn’t be found with three monitors. Enter NEC’s spanking-new PA301Ws—professional-grade 30-inch screens with a price tag to match at $2,300 each. Besides each boasting a 2560x1600 native resolution, the PA301Ws offer the unique ability among 30-inch monitors to pivot into portrait mode. Set side-by-side in this fashion, you’re looking at a wall of 4800x2560 unabashedly color-accurate pixels. True, the PA301Ws lack the Samsung screens’ dainty bezels, but that didn’t prove to be a problem, as the bezels didn’t cross our primary focal point. As it happens, we were able to enable bezel correction with this setup, but we had mixed feelings about the results. Images appeared less “split” by the bezels, but a great deal of information was lost in the process.
NEC’s PA301Ws professional-grade 30-inch monitors overshadow a triad of 23-inch LCDs in resolution, image quality, and girth.
Either way, the editors unanimously found this setup to be unequivocally awesome. Gordon quickly declared it the “best of both worlds” between the previous six- and three-panel setups, and “a superior experience.” Alan called his Call of Duty testing “intense, crazy immersive,” and Need for Speed “freakin’ sick.” Nathan said of World of Warcraft, “Rad! It’s like I’m peering through a window to another world.”
All were in favor of the “vertical improvement” over the other three-panel config and the lack of a horizontal bezel. Gordon was impressed by the details during his Call of Duty run, and he called Need for Speed “ideal,” stating that the PA301Ws were “in all ways better than the six panels.”
So far, so good. So… what else? Three big HDTVs! The idea started as almost a joke by Gordon, but then germinated into a why-the-hell-not proposition. After all, if we want to be immersed in gameplay, what better way than by planting ourselves within a fortress of three giant 46-inch LCD screens. We turned to NEC’s E461s, and we got busy. After some (pretty extensive) troubleshooting, we were ready to press Play.
The E461's obviously eat up huge amounts of space, and while this was easily the most unrealistic of the configs we tested, we had to see how it would play out. Like the three 23-inch panels, the HDTVs, which are 1920x1080 each, had a combined resolution of 5760x1080. But unlike the 23-inch panels, no one was complaining that the display felt too squat. Unfortunately, the aspect ratio and field of view issues that arose in Call of Duty with the other 5760x1080 setup remained.
NECs E461s offer a standard 1920x1080 resolution with a 120Hz refresh rate.
Need for Speed was the biggest hit on this setup. Nathan’s initial impression in the game summed it up nicely: “This is madness.” Alan felt similarly, declaring that the peripheral view of the road rushing past made the game feel faster. Gordon, actually preferred Need for Speed on the TVs to the 30-inch screens, saying it felt like he was really driving and that the horizon appeared as large as in life.
World of Warcraft produced some complaints about the extensive screen real estate: “Turning my head to view data on the side screens destroyed the feeling of immersion and also took my eyes off my character,” said Nathan. Gordon wasn’t bothered by that so much, but did find WoW’s relatively low-res textures to be unusually noticeable on the all-encompassing displays. During Alan’s testing of World of Warcraft, Nathan declared it “more impressive looking” from further back. In fact, one of the drawbacks to using such large screens is that it’s difficult to find a position that’s close enough to feel immersed but not visually overwhelmed; Call of Duty caused dizziness during one portion of our testing.
In the end, the PA301Ws won the votes of all three of our testers—the combination of pristine images spread across increased vertical landscape was just too good. Hey, anything that makes curmudgeonly Gordon utter “ideal” or “bingo” is definitely noteworthy. It’s also one of the more practical setups (while the models themselves might be prohibitively expensive, the configuration is what impressed us); the sheer space that six panels or three HDTVs take up already puts both into the realm of fantasy for most users.
With a combined resolution of 4800x2560, three 30-inch LCD monitors offer grandeur and detail without requiring an outrageous amount of desk space.
But this challenge wasn’t about being realistic; it was about putting our fantasy multiscreen configurations to the test in games—and in that respect, the PA301Ws were the overall winner. While the three E461s did well in World of Warcraft and excelled in Need for Speed, they left us cold during Call of Duty. The six-panel MD230X6 display tripped over its own toes with the bezel issue, and its three-panel sibling wasn’t grand enough to fulfill our desires and struggled with first-person point of view.
While all of the configurations required a considerable amount of setup and troubleshooting, the three vertical displays were ready to go with the fewest difficulties.
Additionally, the three vertical displays could easily be utilized for any other productivity task—from web design and photo and video editing to PowerPoint and Excel, it’s hard to imagine a task this setup couldn’t tackle with ease and aplomb.
Comments are closed on this article
Thamuza
May 27, 2011 at 11:54pm
I would really like to see you guys do things like this with real world mid level and budget setups..
easyeddy
May 16, 2011 at 5:05am
Amazing this kind of mainstream analysis has waited until 2011... credit to maximumpc I guess but the bar's not that high - the article mostly gives just the obvious points though:
- you don't want the crosshairs in a shooter to be on the bezel
- you want thin bezels
- if you put widescreen monitors in 3 x landscape mode you end up with a very wide thin display space which messes up the 3D projection in most games which is too wide-angle for their game engines to display properly.
Here's a few more advanced points:
- * experiment tucking the centre monitor behind the other two so the bezels overlap - then it's important monitors are thin front-to-back to minimise the depth difference. Overlapping the bezels halves the size of the join.
- * most monitors are now widescreen, in a 3x config they should be rotated portrait and it's the typically thicker bezel along the bottom edge of the landscape screen that turns out to be critical as that is now where the screens join. This was tried in the article with the 30" monitors but not 23" - no surprise portrait 3x widescreen is better...
- * 4:3 ratio screens deserve a bit of a comeback for 3x multi-screen gaming as they then give probably the best combined layout in portrait mode. And they are cheap e.g. 3 x 20" 1600x1200 for a good combined resolution that is drivable by a single ATI card.
- * the 3xHDTV (and 3x23") trial was a bust because they didn't try portrait mode although of course that would have needed a custom mount. Even in landscape mode the HDTV's would have been better overlapped but in portrait mode the thick bezel on the bottom of the HDTV would be a killer. Also in portrait mode you don't really want LED's on the 'bottom' bezel because these then glow in the middle of the display...
- * Nvidia and ATI are very different in the way they support multiple screens at the moment because ATI 'eyefinity' basically amounts to a multi-monitor frame buffer built into the card so Direct3D upwards can treat the multi-monitor hardware as a single display area (i.e. built-in TripleHead2go) while Nvidia provides multi-monitor support via Windows (ATI can do this too if you want by turning off the frame buffer). This means games with Nvidia have to have multi-monitor support and in my experience this is shite - much easier to tell the game there's a single monitor with higher resolution which they rarely have a problem with except for extreme widescreen ratios. The fact that a single Nvidia card can only support 2 monitors and the game has to manage them separately means Nvidia is effectively a non-starter for mainstream multi-monitor gaming.
- Cheap monitors won't have a DisplayPort which limited ATI realistically to two DVI/HDMI screens until the $25 DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter (e.g. Sapphire) came along (they used to be $100+) about a year ago, so now cheap 3-screen gaming is fairly easy. This *was* a big issue but now you can ignore all the web threads from a year ago.
I run 3x20" dell 4:3 1600x1200 monitors in portrait mode on an ATI 5870 with a combined resolution of 3600x1600 and haven't yet found a game that doesn't run well at that resolution on the card (BFBC2, FSX, silent hunter, L4D2). Counter-strike runs at 250 fps in some maps but hey, the game is 100 years old. BF3 is out this fall and I'm fairly confident that will run fine too because I can always ease off the AA/AF if I need to as the resolution is high enough that jaggies are *not* the same issue as if you run a large screen with only 1920x1080. Ultimately I may end up putting in a second 5870 - that's always an option but hasn't come close to being necessary yet. This is *not* a low-end config but it's not the 2 x dual-gpu cards suggested in the article...
edit - by the way, in case you have any misunderstanding, in a game like Battlefield Bad Company 2 when you have three screens, the center screen shows exactly the same as a player with a single screen would be seeing, while the left and right screens give you an *additional* field-of-view to the left and right. As a three-screen gamer it's hard to understand how a player with one screen thinks they can compete in a close-up firefight with that narrow view. But if you're going to camp 10 miles away with a sniper rifle there's no difference.
shjt4brains
May 11, 2011 at 2:34pm
It is interesting that there was no mention of panel matching. When configuring dual screen or multi-monitor; brightness, contrast, and even color settings need to match to complete the feeling of a seamless display and enhance the gaming experience. Mismatch of brightness or color can severely compromise the visual enhancement of games in a multi-monitor configuration. This is just one more step that has to be completed in the setup of multi-monitor displays that can take considerable time based on viewing angle (especially in portrait mode) or size of displays (30” or above).
Otherwise great article.
easyeddy
May 16, 2011 at 5:00am
yeah shjt I agree with the issue - one of my monitors was noticeably dimmer than the other two (even though all are 20" dell 4:3 1600x1200) - however it really wasn't a big deal to setup with an image across all 3 screens and manually up the brightness on the dimmest screen until they looked ok. Maybe my reds, greens or blues are slightly off but I've never noticed. It's not the biggest issue though - in a 3D game you really need to minimise the effect of the bezels and bezel management would mean you lose that portion of the image and you could get shot from there... (although diagonal lines now line up perfectly across the screens) - my preferred approach is to *not* use bezel management but minimize the bezel width by overlapping the screens slightly - now you have to futz with the vertical mounts to get the images mostly aligned where you most look (e.g. the horizon in FSX) but accept a slight offset elsewhere. From sitting centrally in front of the screens there's no focus issue with the slightly recessed center screen, but there is a slight parallax issue vertically. In a firefight you don't think about it at all though.
Logun
May 11, 2011 at 11:11am
I just wanted to verify this:
"...PA301Ws offer the unique ability among 30-inch monitors to pivot into portrait mode"
No other 30 inch monitors allow a pivot into portrait mode?? Not even your best of the best ZR30W?
trgz
May 10, 2011 at 11:29am
Three of the more hardcore gamers on staff were photoshopped poorly into the images. Why bother if it a) looks so poor, and b) looks so cheesy?
thetechchild
May 10, 2011 at 3:28am
This is great if we have loads of cash lying around, but correct me if I'm wrong in saying that most of us don't. A better article would be testing a number of sub-$300 monitors of various sizes and aspect ratios in pairs. While these dream setups are nice to fantasize about, I'd like to know about a dual-monitor setup that doesn't force me to sell my home.
spRICE
May 10, 2011 at 10:57am
I'm pretty sure that you can't use a dual monitor setup for gaming. This article was specifically about using triple monitor setups in gaming. And besides, this is MaximumPC, not MinimumPC. I like reading about things that I can only fantasize about and I can't afford because it's entertaining.
easyeddy
May 16, 2011 at 4:42am
if 2 x $300 monitors means you have a budget of $600 without selling your house, then you're still better off with 3 x $200 monitors. It needn't be expensive though. Cheapest solution is 3x19" monitors which also allows cheaper graphics card as each screen is 1440x900 for total 2700x1440 across a 55" display space. Move up a notch and you can have 3x1920x1080 with maybe 23" monitors at $160 a piece (newegg), but also assume a good graphics card, and add $25 for a displayport->DVI adapter (or buy a Saphire ATI card including the adapter).
al360ex
May 09, 2011 at 6:32pm
Nice reference to Buffy !
For those of you who didn't get it, read the subtitle of Configuration 3...
And get a life ! :)
BUFFY FOREVER !!!!!
Lol, I'm just joking.
But seriously, if you haven't watch this TV show, or heard of it, I have one question for you :
Where have you been in the last decade ?
crazitrain02
May 09, 2011 at 5:08pm
With almost any game that natively supports triple-head gaming, there is some type of a HUD fix for it. Once you get the HUD fix in place, you shouldn't have to look to the left or right monitors to get the vital information that you need in a game.
WashTub
May 09, 2011 at 3:12pm
Call of duty has horrible aspect ratio to start Widescreen fixer works great for COD:MW2 not sure if theres a version for black ops.
sepiid
May 09, 2011 at 2:01pm
What about a 23" setup all in portait mode?
or the tvs mounted and in portait mode?
we need way more maximum here
Big Hoss
May 09, 2011 at 12:54pm
I remember watching the video with a bunch of different multiple-monitor configs. There were lots of complaints, but I felt proud that MaximumPC posted an article that is MAXIMUM. This is the type of stuff I love.
Although, you become less maximum when you play racing games on a 360 controller instead of a wheel. Seriously.
Thanks for the article.
