Brief Maxivista review

[Nsight7]

I finally got and installed new video cards in two different computers for the purposes of multi-monitoring. They were 128MB PNY AGP 8x cards. Best part, they only cost about $60.00 after shipping (that is the total for both, not each individually).

Seeing as I didn't really want to go about installing anymore hardware anytime soon, I decided I would give Maxivista a try. Using the demo version I installed an extra montior. The results were decent, but somewhat mixed.

In particular, I used my Pentium M w/ 512MB DDR2 RAM as the primary and my older comp of negligible specs (something like Athlon 3000+ XP and 512MB DDR RAM) as the secondary. I attached one monitor to my laptop and the third remained connected to my secondary comp. Finally I used Firewire for the connection between my primary and secondary, in particular Firewire 400.

So, when I started out, the connection was REALLY buggy, but I had used the Firewire port on the front of my computer. For good measure I also used a Cat5 but that was worse. Then I moved the connection to the back, or directly into the motherboard, and it was much smoother. I considered trying USB at this point but considered it to be worthless to try since it could only get a bit faster at best.

At this point I evaluated the stuff and I must say it works OK. It seems to work fine but it is very obviously not quite that fast. Blur lines and junk and very brief pauses, but not bad. It works alright for playing poker, but I still think one would be better off grabbing a cheap video card for additional monitors because of its bugginess (often you do have to pause and wait for mouse to catch up a bit and for buttons to click, which is hard on multi-tablers), but if you haven't got money or have an older computer with only PCI (as opposed to PCI-E)connections, this probably works best.

However, as soon as USB 3.0 comes in mass-use, Maxivista could become the absolute best idea. For now, it is merely suitable.