Introduction

One of the things that has returned to popularity over the last few year has been the use of multiple monitors in the home. In business this has been a standard for quite some time. In fact, most of the companies that I have run the IT department for have used multiple monitors (at the very least for their accounting and sales departments). It allows you more room and to also run multiple "full screen" applications at once.

Of course, this is usually talking about dual monitors and not getting into the more extravagant world of triple and quad monitors. The problem is that in many cases unless you want to spend more money to get a GPU like AMD's Eyefinity and Display Port capable monitors, you are not going to get three or more monitors running. Well, that, as we said, is usually the case anyway.

Recently we happened upon a product that gets around all of that through the use of active video splitting to take the input from a single DisplayPort connection and send it out to three DVI capable monitors. Manufactured by StarTech, the ConvergeAV uses an Active DisplayPort connection to convert the video signal from ANY graphics card into three outputs. The ConvergeAV is not cheap, though; it retails for around $300 when we could find it online. Still, let's see if this can really do the same job as an Eyefinity setup, or is this just a neat gadget.