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Read more.Look, ma, no power wire.
watercooled (16-11-2012)
Definitely very interesting. If you want a quick and easy way to add a second monitor, this seems like a decent alternative. Especially if you don't have any spare DVI/VGA ports or whatever.
Still, would like to see what's possible with USB3.
Interesting, I would have assumed they'd have bundled a usb graphics card but I guess that would cost too much. A good product a few years ago maybe but as you say Kushan, a USB3 one would be interesting!
A boon to mobile types I'm thinking. I might even invest in one myself for when I'm holidaying and want a better than 15" display.
Of course I'm perfect you just need to lower your expectations.
I would be more interested in a monitor without a video cable than one without a power cable. I could then put my base unit in my spare room and not be worried about fan noise. I already have a cordless keyboard and mouse, wi-fi printer and wi-fi router. Therefore the only reason for having my base unit near me when I use my computer is the video cable. However, as far as I am aware there are no wi-fi or radio enabled monitors. Given that movies can be streamed to a TV why can't video output be streamed to a monitor?
Silas74, i present to you the KFA2 GTX 460 WDHI : http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...s-card-review/
You can't compare streaming video to a display interface; when you're receiving video over the air, it takes a fair amount of bandwidth, and involves a lot of latency. It can be on the order of seconds from a TV receiving an RF signal and displaying the image, as it has to run through decoding hardware. This doesn't matter for TV/video use but it's obviously a problem for interactive use like computing or especially gaming; this is a problem with the likes of OnLive, while you might get high fps, there's a fairly high input latency (another reason why comparing solely FPS when benchmarking is flawed).
Proper display interfaces transmit uncompressed video, but this takes a huge amount of bandwidth, from several to tens of Gbits/s, and at very low latency. With USB 2.0, you're trying to cram that through a few hundred Mbits/s at best, so there are going to be trade-offs.
Wireless solutions exist, but they're expensive and I don't know how well they perform in terms of latency.
@jimbouk: What do you mean by a USB graphics card? USB has nowhere near the latency of bandwidth requirements of something like PCIe in order to interface with the CPU, so it makes more sense to render and compress the stream on the PC before sending it to a USB monitor.
Oh and thanks for the detailed review, you covered the questions I had about the monitor in good detail, and I agree with your conclusion.
Something like this: StarTech USB to DVI External Video Card Multi Monitor Adapter.Originally Posted by watercooled
It says it has 32MB of SDRAM so it's not exactly going to perform well, but for 2D document work it should be ok. Couldn't find any details about how they actually work on the internet, enlightenment most welcome!
Similar to what's inside this monitor probably; the heavy lifting is done on the PC in order to fit into the very limited USB bandwidth, then it just converts the signal to DVI for compatibility. It's not a graphics card/GPU and much like the monitor will be very limited in what it can do, RAM is far from the whole story. This sort of thing still needs drivers on top of an OS to work properly, i.e. the OS needs to be booted before it will display anything, you can't modify BIOS settings with it for example.
jimbouk (16-11-2012)
Fair enough, just using the same DisplayLink trick then. I guess the RAM is just a buffer to help with the decoding of the video stream. You learn something knew every day
The price is a bit of a turn off, and the fact that although USB its not strictly 'plug and play'
...but if they update for USB 3, i(which will prob need only 1 socket for the power, and would be quicker signal...) then this could become a more interesting product.
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