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.

[erbbysam]

um.... but what is maxivista?
upon further review:
[ QUOTE ]

How MaxiVista works
MaxiVista performs a clever trick, as computers generally lack video inputs which would be required to use a PC as a monitor screen .
Instead of using a video cable, MaxiVista utilizes any standard Wireless LAN or Ethernet network connection to transmit the screen contents or to send keyboard/mouse input to the second PC.


[/ QUOTE ]
...imo alot of it's features are already available within Windows if you have a vga port.
Personally, I'm sticking with ultramon w/VGA ports but... this is pretty nifty if this actually works, think of the number of tables:

[Nsight7]

Uh, yeah, if you install a video card with extra ports for monitors (either VGA or DVI) you are going to get better everything. And technically you are only limited by the number of ports on your motherboard in which you can plug video-cards. However, video-cards tend to be rather expensive as a solution to multi-monitoring. If you already have several computers (in particular several laptops) around it could save you money.

That said, you can get very basic video cards for as little as $25.00, which is about the price that I got each of my 128MB video-cards. Now a 128MB video card isn't good for much insofar as gaming is concerned, but it is just fine for basic multi-monitoring and poker play, and it certainly beats the crap out of Maxivista in quality. However, you would also have to buy extra monitors, which can get expensive as well.

So in summary, if you have several laptops and very basic needs (i.e. surfing the web and opening documents), Maxivista is fine. However, any more advanced uses (i.e. playing a movie and/or playing poker) and you would be better served by buying new video-cards and some monitors as long as money isn't a huge object (it is OK for poker, but not much better).

Btw, unless you use more than three monitors you could have used multimon instead of ultramon, as they both more or less do the same thing, with the exception that multimon is free. Also, DVI >> VGA for big-screen monitoring, hehe.

[Nsight7]

Just for clarification, the video cards I got each had two monitor plugs. So for each computer I have I can dual-monitor already. I was simply trying to expand my set-up even further.