|
The VTBook from Village Tronic is a PCMCIA video card for adding an additional monitor to a laptop. Suggested retail price is US$ 249.
Review created December 2, 2003. Updated November 20, 2004, for the dualhead cable.
Test systems
- Dell Latitude X300 with a Pentium-M 1.2 GHz, Intel 855GM chipset, 640 MB RAM, Windows XP SP1
- Dell Latitude CPt S with a Celeron 600 MHz, Intel 440BX chipset, 128 MB RAM, Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2000 SP4
The VTBook was connected to a Gateway 15" CRT using the included DVI-to-VGA adapter.
The video card
The card has a Trident XP2 chipset, 32 MB RAM and a DVI connector. A DVI-to-VGA adapter is included.
I used the 1.5.1 drivers for Windows XP, the 1.5.2b2 beta drivers for Windows 2000. Earlier versions of Windows are not supported.
The following picture shows the card together with the included DVI-to-VGA adapter.
2D
Maximum resolutions according to Village Tronic are 1920x1200 @ 32-bit for DVI, and for VGA 1920x1440, but that's at 16-bit and 60 Hz refresh rate. Maximum usable resolutions for VGA (32-bit, at least 75 Hz) are 1440x900 and 1280x1024.
The complete list of supported resolutions is available here.
Display rotation is supported, to switch to portrait mode you'll need to select a portrait display mode in Display Properties. Changing display orientation using the tab in advanced display properties doesn't work yet.
Color adjustments are supported via a custom tab in advanced display properties.
3D
Both Direct3D and OpenGL are supported, with okay performance. It's no card for games though, for example with the Moire screen saver I got around 30 FPS on the Latitude X300, with the built-in Intel chipset 60 FPS.
The drivers aren't 100% stable with regards to 3D yet, for example Unreal Tournament 2003 usually froze after a couple of minutes.
Video
Video overlays are supported. Overlay settings such as brightness and saturation can be adjusted through a custom tab in advanced display properties.
Power management
Both standby and hibernation are supported. This worked fine on both Windows XP and 2000, but on Windows 2000 there was an issue with hibernation: when resuming the system, the display connected to the VTBook was reset to the default refresh rate.
Hot unplugging
Removing the video card while the system is running isn't supported. This is a limitation of current versions of Windows. According to Village Tronic, Microsoft will add hot unplug support for video cards in Longhorn (the next major version of Windows), and Village Tronic is investigating the possibility of adding hot unplug support for current versions of Windows as well.
Dualhead cable
With a special dualhead cable and driver (Windows XP only), the VTBook can drive 2 monitors, 1 VGA + 1 DVI. This works fine, but has some limitations:
- maximum resolution for each monitor is 1024x768 with 32-bit color, or 1280x1024 with 16-bit color
- only the monitor connected to the DVI port can be set as primary
- 3D performance is much lower than in singlehead mode
See VTBook DualHead for more information on the dualhead feature.
Conclusion
This is clearly the best PCMCIA video card currently available, and a good replacement for the older cards from Appian and Margi.
More information
Questions or comments? Post them to the forum
|
