A Closer Look

If you want to attach up to six Displays to one graphics card, it is crucial that this card supports DisplayPort 1.2 standard. From this version of DisplayPort onwards Multi Stream is being supported. In the end this means, that one cable can carry three independent signals.

Club 3D’s MST Hub is not only suitable for Gaming. If you connect it to a notebook you can easily connect three displays to it via only one DisplayPort. Another way to connect additional displays to a notebook is USB-to-VGA/DVI adaptors. For 2D content this works just find but if you want to display 3D you’re stuck, since it just won’t work. Another neat feature of the Club 3D MST Hub is, that the displays are being recognized as individual devices. Maybe you know Matrox’ approach, where a software spans one huge resolution over all connected displays, which is not always what you actually want.

A closer look at the Club 3D MST Hub shows that the 100 Euro device is basically a compact adaptor, which features four DisplayPort connectors. On one side of the thing there is one input and on the other there are three outputs. Additionally the Hub comes with a power connector and during our measurements we’ve seen that it needs about 2.5 Watt on average. When looking at the delivery we would have liked to see a DisplayPort-to-Mini-DisplayPort-adaptor in the box. If notebooks feature a DisplayPort connector then it’s a mini-DisplayPort in most cases.

Maybe you’re wondering now what happens when you plug the Club 3D MST Hub to an NVIDIA GeForce 600 or 700 Series graphics card. Since these cards support DisplayPort 1.2 too, it should basically work. In case of NVIDIA cards you’re limited to four displays per card. Furthermore you only get the option to use the displays as independent devices and you can’t span one big resolution over all the screens. If you want to do that, then you have to take an AMD card.

During our tests with different devices, we’ve seen that the Club 3D MST Hub works just great on new Haswell notebooks too. If you attach the Hub to a Haswell notebook, you can send a signal to up to three independent displays. Since Intel’s 4th generation processors support a maximum of three displays the internal notebook panel gets disabled.



 

Page - 1 - Introduction

Page - 2 - Preview

Page - 3 - Closer look

Page - 4 - Conclusion