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Driving two monitors is easy enough with most modern videocards; in fact, late-model AMD Radeon HD cards can drive three (although one must be equipped with DisplayPort). Accell’s UltraAV multi-monitor adapters allow you to connect three displays to a single DisplayPort source. The model we examined supports three single-link DVI monitors using a single DisplayPort source; the company offers a second SKU that supports three DisplayPort monitors from a single DisplayPort. Both suffer from the same limitations: Reliance on DisplayPort on the host side, and maximum resolution of 3840x1024 (supporting three 1280x1024 displays).
Connecting the Accell's UltraAV is a dead simple process.
The adapter is extremely simple to set up: Connect its built-in 45-inch locking DisplayPort 1.1a cable to your source and use three DVI cables to connect three monitors. Accell recommends using displays with the same native resolution and refresh rate; otherwise, the adapter will use a resolution that’s common to all three. DVI connector 1 drives the left-hand monitor, DVI connector 2 drives the center, and DVI connector 3 drives the right-hand monitor. The box draws power over a USB connector that splits from DisplayPort cable, eliminating the need for a brick. You don’t need to install any software.
The UltraAV adapter uses an IDT PanelPort VMM1300 chip and reports itself to your GPU as a single output device via EDID (extended display identification data) that supports a variety of resolutions, including 3840x1024, 3840x720, 2400x600, 1280x1024, and 1440x900. Whichever resolution you choose, that number of pixels image gets stretched over the three-screen combo--unlike Matrox's pricier TripleHead2Go product, you can't set up three independent desktops. And while there’s nothing stopping you from using higher-resolution displays that support at least one of those lower resolutions, you won’t want to because you'll get either black bars (if the monitor can display the correct aspect ratio) or a stretched, distorted image.
Windows sees the Accell adapter as one very wide display.
We plugged the UltraAV adapter into an AMD Radeon HD 5870 card and then connected three 21.5-inch Dell LCD displays to the adapter. Each display's native resolution is 1920x1080 pixels. The UltraAV adapter detected the monitors and set the videocard’s display resolution to 3840x720; we had to manually goose the operating system to drive the card at the max resolution of 3840x1024. The entire Windows desktop was stretched across the three displays, including the taskbar, so the system behaved as if it were talking to a single, very wide display.
Once the hardware was set up, applications ran without a hitch. Even games ran fine, though always stretched across all three screens. Benchmarks were typical of a Radeon HD 5870 running at 3840x1024. The Unigine Heaven benchmark, for example, posted 23 frames per second (all settings at normal, with AA off) on our Core i7 965X system.
If you have a relatively new desktop or notebook PC that supports DisplayPort, plus three monitors that support the same native resolution, Accell’s UltraAV adapter is a good solution. If you’ve moved up to higher-resolution wide-screen monitors, the adapter isn’t all that compelling because it can't take advantage of their native resolutions. In that case, one of AMD's Eyefinity videocards might be your ticket to multi-monitor bliss--although that solution is available only with desktop computers, requires adapters to drive DVI displays, and costs three times more than Accell's UltraAV adapter.
Simple installation; no software needed; seen as a single display by Windows.
Limited max resolution; best suited to monitors with 4:3 aspect ratios; requires DisplayPort source.
