Triplehead Shenanigans

I was pretty excited this week because after a long time of yearning for one I finally got myself a Triplehead2Go Digital. The Triplehead2Go lets you combine three monitors into one virtual monitor for both Windows app work and gaming. The digital version is the cool one that does bezel management to make the desktop look as seemless as possible.

People must be getting ready for the ATI 58XX series multi-monitor cards and starting to dump them or maybe I just got lucky because I saw the TH2GO on Australian Ebay with a ridiculously cheap buy it now price. They just don't show up on Ebay often and to buy them new it's $650+ bucks. I got mine for less than half that.

Well I plugged in the TH2GO, the three monitors and ran up the software. All good. I was then prompted to reboot the PC. Then the fun started - a black screen. Fine I thought, unplugged it all and plugged in the single monitor - again a black screen.

Oh crap. I pulled out the drive, attached it to another PC via a SATA to USB convertor and editted the BOOT.INI to put in the /SOS switch on the Windows startup so I could get the boot log on screen during startup. I also threw in /BASEVIDEO for good measure. I then put the drive back in my PC and booted. I now had the scrolling text bootup sequence that stopped at system.log. Bugger. That's not particularly informative. I hoped the registry wasn't cactus. I booted the PC from a Windows XP SP2 boot CD to get into the recovery console and look around. But in the Windows setup startup, I got the blue screen of death with a STOP error indicating an inaccessible boot device. Arrghh. Must be a special driver to access the SATA disk.

So pulled out the original OEM Windows XP install CD. Booted into Windows setup ok and started up the recovery console. I listed the Windows services using LISTSVC and saw two Matrox services set to autostart - "Matrox Centering Service" and "Matrox.PDesk3.ServicesHost". I disabled both those services, crossed fingers and rebooted.

Yay! Windows now booted ok. Big sigh of relief. Now to get the damn thing to work. I've run it up ok on my laptop and three screens, so the TH2GO is ok, must be some incompatibility with my desktop.


Edit: Got it working with my new PC without to much drama. The latest Catalyst 9.9 drivers dropped support for some widescreen resolutions (why???!!!) including 3840x1024. Versions 9.10 and 9.11 have the same problem. Reverting to version 9.6 fixed the problem. Triplehead configuration for gaming is fantastic.

My TripleHead screenies:

Rise of Flight


ARMAII


DCS: Black Shark

Battle of BritaIn II


Supreme Commander


Half Life 2


Ghost Recon


rFactor


Call of Duty 4

Antec 300

I recently bought a Antec 300 mid tower case as part of a new PC build for myself. It is fantastic value ($97 AUD), with excellent build quality and well thought out design. The case is strong and without sharp edges. I did check out a lot of cases including Coolermaster Centurions and Lian Li Dragon Lords. What I like best about the Antec 300 case is the design work has gone into functionality not the unnecessary bling you see with so many cases. Also the excellent ventilation with the full face grill with dust filter and the two fan bays in the front. I'm glad it doesn't have unnecessary mounting kit rubbish for the HDDs. So happy with this purchase I had to post about it.

Here's a review of the case:

So far I've also bought a Antec Earthwatts 650 PSU and two Seagate 500 SATA drives (ST3500418AS) to run in RAID0. With the release of the i5 CPUs I'm not sure what to do with the CPU and motherboard - whether to go AMD Phenom II AM3 955 BE or i5 750, or whether to use a Q6600 I have in a second PC and overclock the ass out of it. Leaning towards the i5 at the moment due to the ability of those boards to do both crossfire and SLI.

[I ended up building a i5 750 system. Full specs - i5 750, Gigabyte P55-UD4P, 4 GB DDR3 1333 RAM, 2X 500 GB SATA HDDs (RAID0) OS drive, 1 x 750 GB IDE backup drive, Gigabyte ATI 4980 OC, G5 Mouse, G11 Keyboard. I would have liked a ATI 5850 but they are a bastard to find and a bit of a rip off price-wise at the moment. Also there is an issue with Triplehead support with the more recent Catalyst drivers. The RAID0 performed a bit less than I expected with a average read speed of 135 MB/sec (compared to 104 MB/sec for a single drive), but the system is still working extremely well.]