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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

MacBook Pro 13" with two external LCDs (monitors)

MacBook Pro with two external LCDs
The article describes steps how to connect more than one LCDs to your MacBook Pro. It also point out my experience I have been facing to. 
Let's starts with hardware specification to be correct. 


Laptop: Apple Mac Book Pro, 13" inches, model 2011, Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM DDR3 1333MHz
1st LCD: 24" HP LP2475w - S-IPS res. 1920x1200, 6x USB  
2nd LCD: 24" Samsung SyncMaster 2443BW - TN res. 1920x1200


USB Display Adapter: DIAMOND BVU195 USB Display Adapter - res. up to 2048x1152
MacBook Pro with Graphics Adapter 
 
I stick this on the bottom for better cooling 
Adapter is sticked under the desk
Let's describe installation. 
I do believe it is not necessary more touch how to connect all cables together. Well,  BVU195 is DisplayLink certificated one. Diamond Media does not provide any Mac OS drivers on the CD. You have to download them from the interent according to your operating system ( section support - Mac Software -  HERE ). Mine is MacOS X Snow Leopard 10.6  -> DisplayLing USB Graphics Macintosh Driver 1.6 .


Since the driver is installed and everything connected, it JUST works! (I've heard that somewhere :)) You can arrange your LCDs and Laptop display as you want. 


Everything works pretty smooth, any opened window movement is good, event when is playing YouTube. I have not seen visible delays on both LCDs. Well, full screen FLASH (YouTube) mode on screen connected via Adapters has delay issu. I think  it is not big deal, you can still use the other LCD. 


When you compare the price of Matrox Solution (Matrox DualHead2Go - around 200$) the winner is shiny. Yes, you are right, it's BVU195 (68$). 
Its another big advantage is the screen resolution independency. That means, you can have connected screens with different resolutions and it's working really fine. 


BVU195 is available on US AMAZON to order. In Europe there is no big chance to buy any equivalent device. All I've found ones with low resolutions and no MAC supports mostly. The BVU195 I could only recommend for all those, that wants to receive multi LCDs experience. 


Coding on them is incredible good! 3D coding/development reality :) 
Everything is working perfectly. You can have 6 LCDs via usb connected via DisplayLink support
 

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