Mview: first look

[dotnetdot]

Hi everyone, it’s my first post here :) What I’m writing about today is my first experience with MV103-HDVE Pro from Mviewtech. I first heard about Mview in this post (http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/node/10952 then I was lucky enough to have a friend bring me one mv103 pro from their office in Shanghai.

After messing around with all the cables, drivers and software setups for 2 hours yesterday, I was able to light up 3 Philip 220CW LCDs at a resolution of 5040x1050@60Hz with a Sapphire 4870X2.

Here are some pictures of Mview MV103-HDVE Pro itself.




The box looks a bit bigger than Matrox triplehead2go. It arrived with a Dual-Link DVI cable, a RS232 cable, a power adapter, and a driver CD, which contains: a manual and hardware specifications in Chinese but with English titles :roll: ), English and Chinese drivers. The hardware installation is very similar to what we do with TH2G, except for that optional RS232 cable. Since my mainboard has no COM ports, I simply left this part out. But I heard you can actually connect this RS232 cable to a second computer with a COM port and write screen resolution settings to your mview box from there. After powering up the computer, the bios check and windows startup screen was only shown on the monitor in the middle instead of across all 3 of them.

Setting up the driver in Vista took me a while, but later I realized it also requires the ATI Catalyst 9.6 and later versions to support wide-screen modes. After a clean install of the latest ATI driver and the Mview driver, I chose “enable wide-mode timings” and restarted the computer. Then in the windows display settings, the resolution bar was able to move all the way to the right to “5040 by 1050 pixels.” :-D I couldn’t wait to click on “Apply, “ and then BAAM! There we go, I didn’t even touch the refresh rate settings, which is by default 60Hz.



Setting up the display resolutions in games are just like TH2G. So far I’ve tested: The Witcher, Cyrsis Warhead, fallout 3, Stalker:Clear Sky. All the games can run at 5040x1050@60Hz properly but only in windowed mode, otherwise display becomes distorted. Also the frame rate has dropped, perhaps due to the windowed mode and that resolution I’m playing in. I’m still looking for a solution for this.

The Witcher



Fallout 3



Stalker:CS




So far the hardware experience has been satisfying. My main concern is their software support. I can’t find anything that looks like driver or firmware updates on their website (me Chinese :) ), besides their poor English support. Nevertheless Mviewtech is gaining more and more attention from the widescreen gamers, I guess they’ve already realized this, and really hope they can take individual international gamers into consideration for their marketing strategies.

[BHawthorne]

Thanks for a firsthand look. It helps answer a few things and also gives us an idea of the potential of the product. The trick is going to be making it better compatible with games.

[thales100]

Nice mini review, thanks dotnetdot. :)

[WaveZtream]

5040x1050@60Hz that is enough for me to cum :P Well at least its looking good. What is Matrox excuse now :)

[g00seberry]

Thanks for the review! Lots of people will be very interested in this.

Can you expand on "becomes distorted" when not windowed? What happens? If you can post details then hopefully we can try and figure out what might need to be done to get this to work in fullscreen. :)

[suiken_2mieu]

Can we do anything with those bezels?
Also, is it HDCP compliant?

[Mach1.9pants]

Interesting to see STALKER running in DX10 mode at 5040, even if you get 5040 with Vista/Win7 and TH2Go you cannot get 5040 DX10 AFAIK (I couldn't when I was running that before the NV driver change made me go back to XP)

[thales100]

Interesting to see STALKER running in DX10 mode at 5040, even if you get 5040 with Vista/Win7 and TH2Go you cannot get 5040 DX10 AFAIK (I couldn't when I was running that before the NV driver change made me go back to XP)

Yes, its not possible here too, Vista _+ triplehead2go DE , running 190.58 drivers and the latest PowerDesk by Matrox. So this Mviewer supports DX10 at 5040x1050 60 Hz.

[whismerhill]

this Mview device seems like a holy grail
I mean : no funky monitor compatibility problems since it's running at 60Hz & no waiting for Display Port graphic cards ..

plus it seems we got an Mview guy on the forum ...

[dotnetdot]

Hi guys, glad to see my post has given you some useful information.

Can you expand on "becomes distorted" when not windowed? What happens? If you can post details then hopefully we can try and figure out what might need to be done to get this to work in fullscreen. :)

Crysis: Warhead in full screen, you can see there is a ghost options window on the right screen. But I'm able to alt-enter to full screen once I start with a windowed game, and it runs fine.


The Witcher, seems a lot of images are stacking up. Sadly this game doesn't respond to alt-enter :(


Right now I have no idea how to solve this problem. There isn't much software utility to play with except for the driver. But I believe there must be a way. My rig is P5Q-E, [email protected], 4G ram, Sapphire 4870x2, 650W ATX, Auzentech X-fi 7.1, 3XPhilips 220CW.

Can we do anything with those bezels?
Also, is it HDCP compliant?

Currently I don't have any utility to do things like bezel management. When gaming, I simply hide part of the side monitors behind the middle one. My eyes focus on the central screen, so it's not really a problem atm.

I'm not sure it is HDCP compliant. My guess is not :wink: I don't have a blueray DVD drive yet and I don't know how to test it :oops:

I'll mail them with all the above things and see what they say about it.

[thales100]

When gaming, I simply hide part of the side monitors behind the middle one. My eyes focus on the central screen, so it's not really a problem atm.

lol thats what i do too :lol:


Can you run Crysis at 5040x1050 DX 10 ?

[dotnetdot]

Can you run Crysis at 5040x1050 DX 10 ?

Absolutely yes. Frame rate is 20fps or so with "Gamer" on everything. But it's not likely a Mview issue :)

[mviewtech]

Hi dotnetdot:
Thanks for your feedback. We will check with our test engineers for your issue and update you once we got results.

suiken_2mieu:
MView don't support HDCP and Bezels.

[Leapo]

No bezel management? Well, there goes all my interest in this product :(

[Magic Man]

Never had an issue with bezels to be honest (although the HP 1965 19" units I'm using have relatively small bezels) - I leave bezel management off with my dTH2Go.

It's a very 'interesting' design though - strange how similar to the TH2Go... Would have thought Matrox will be keen to look into it a bit deeper as well.

Although, saying that, looks like these guys have sorted some issues that Matrox haven't yet, i.e. 60Hz etc.

[whismerhill]

in any case depending on how EyeFinity turns out to be reliable, this product might be already dead :?

[Downtown1]

I'd be pretty pissed if I was the CEO of this company, a week since they launched and already EyeFinity is poised to kill them off.

[shiney_face]

I don't use bezel management either... Good to see competition, TH2GO is drastically overpriced and undersupported due to the monopoly. I was pretty cut that I paid the same ammount for a stamped steel box with a 2 layer pcb and a few ICs as I paid for my GTX285 at the time..

Also, Eyefinity won't kill demand for these boxes it will only reduce it by some ammount less than 50%. If Nvidia bring out something similar for Fermi then that will kill demand :)

[suiken_2mieu]

I personally like these boxes because of the flexibility of resolution. Eyefinity Only allows the use of the Highest Common Resolution. So having 3x1920x1200 panels must use 1920x1200 for each panel, They cannot save some fps by going to 3x1680x1050 without having to use a EDID Mask. But the mask wont allow for the 5760x1200 on the desktop and 5040x1050 in game.

[Magic Man]

Are any of these products available from any distributors/suppliers in the UK...?