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Asus VW223B
With spreadsheets, documents, browsers and emails on the go, most of us at PC Pro have cobbled together whatever ageing monitors we can find to give us dual-display working environments. But once you've plugged in two TFTs, adding more is either a pain or simply impossible.
The answer, according to Asus, lies not in buying more graphics cards, but in sending the image via USB instead. Connect its EZlink-enabled VW223B to your PC using the provided USB cable, install the driver from the CD when prompted, and it's ready to go. An EZLink icon sits in the system tray, and with a quick click you can control what's output to the monitor, from straightforward mirroring to extending the desktop.
We fired up DisplayMate to test the picture quality, and the results were good. The black level is deep, gradients smooth, and the 3,000:1 dynamic contrast meant we could distinguish the final few shades at both ends of the scale. The 300cd/m2 brightness doesn't result in perfect bright white screens, though - it has a slight green tinge that we couldn't remove.
But EZLink's real weakness is that USB has much lower bandwidth than DVI or VGA. Load up video or a 3D game and you'll see why USB 2 won't be challenging DVI anytime soon. Even an older game such as Call of Duty 2 is rendered up to a second slower on the Asus than on a normal monitor. And when we tried maximising the most basic low-resolution video clips, we found they stuttered to the point of being unwatchable.
It's clearly not suitable for any sort of entertainment, but in a multi-monitor setup that's not an issue: just make sure you watch video on your main DVI monitor and use the Asus as an Outlook screen, or for web browsing. If you really want to go to town, you can daisy-chain up to six of the things from a single USB port on your PC.
The Asus VW223B won't be for everyone and we wouldn't advise using it as a primary monitor either, especially as it only has a VGA input to supplement the USB. But for anyone looking to extend their desktop without splashing out on a new graphics card, it's an ingenious idea.
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