| EVGA UV Plus+ UV-19 USB Display Hub |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Accessories | |
| Written by Nate Swetland - Edited by Olin Coles | |
| Wednesday, 23 June 2010 | |
EVGA UV Plus+ UV-19 USB Display HubComputer desktop real estate is something that you can never have too much of. Adding multiple monitors to your system is one of the easiest ways to add precious pixels to your desktop. EVGA is no stranger to the realm of display technologies, and their new product, the UV Plus UV-19 (Model: 100-U2-UV19-TR) aims to make that easier on everyone using DisplayLink technology. Benchmark Reviews is going to take a look at this external USB Display extender and see what it can offer. EVGA boasts such features as USB 2.0 convenience, DVI connection, Small design, and Low-power consumption, just to name a few. Will the UV Plus+ UV-19 live up the EVGA name? Stay tuned to the the rest of the article on Benchmark Reviews to find out. Having multiple monitors on a PC is nothing new. Many newer graphics cards allow from two separate displays up to as many as six or more displays per card. These cards can be very costly and take a bit of computer know-how to get properly set up. Adding more graphics cards to a system can further increase the display capacity, but increases the cost and complexity of the system. Additionally, these types of graphics cards are a luxury for desktops, and more specifically, desktops with expansion card slots to spare. Laptop and Small Form Factor PC users do not have the ability to install 4 separate graphic cards into their system, so many find themselves lucky if they can display their desktop on two separate displays. This is where the UV Plus+ line from EVGA fits in. The idea is: if you have a spare USB port, you have the ability to hook up an additional display to your system. No longer do you have to sacrifice computer desktop real estate when you choose to purchase a laptop, a netbook, or a SFF PC. No longer should you be required to purchase an additional video card, or come up with some cumbersome adapter to add a spare display to your system. EVGA has utilized the technology of DisplayLink for this product to allow it to use both CPU and GPU power to drive the display.
On paper, this seems like a wonderful device. Now, let's take a look and see if a USB display adapter can properly compliment a system and replace the need to add additional graphic cards to your machine. Will this adapter live up to the well known and well respected EVGA name that is practically synonymouswith high-end display technology? Read on and find out. About EVGAEVGA was founded in July, 1999. EVGA's headquarters is located in Brea, California. EVGA is most well-known for their top of the line NVIDIA video cards, and their equally top of the line motherboards. Always on the bleeding edge of technology, EVGA gave the world the first 4 way SLI motherboard, and currently offers products ranging from video cards, to motherboards, to monitors, to various other PC accessories. UV Plus+ FeaturesKey Features
Directly from evga.com: Take any available USB port on your Desktop or Notebook and turn it into an additional video output for use with another display. With a small footprint and a unique magnetic-stackable design for use with multiple UV16 or UV19 units, UV Plus+ products allow for additional displays to increase productivity by expanding, rotating, or mirroring your virtual workspace through an easy to understand and operate software interface. UV Plus+ is powered by USB and uses Lossless Compression for transferring video signal which provides a crystal clear viewing experience on your additional display. The GPU-less design utilizes a virtual driver and high-performance DDR memory with full support for Windows Vista Aero and high resolution capabilities. With all of these features in one tiny package, the EVGA UV Plus+ is the perfect, easy solution for an additional monitor in only minutes. EVGA UV-19 Specifications
UV-19 Requirements
Closer Look: EVGA UV Plus+This is the top of the EVGA UV Plus+ UV-19. As you can see, there is not much to this device.
It is 2.5in x 2.5in and roughly .5in tall. Cosmetically, it is very attractive and very minimalist.
In this photo, you can see the label for the Power/Status indicator. The light is aqua/turquoise in color, and flashes to indicate activity similar to a HDD light. The large plastic "E" on the top also lights up. Internally, there is an LED that simply shines through the translucent plastic. The light is a pleasant color, and is not at all distracting. It is easy enough to notice, but not so bright as to make you want to hide it in a dark room.
On the bottom, you can see the model number (100-U2-UV19-TR) and the DisplayLink logo. Also, the bottom is magnetized which allows you to stack these devices easily. This prevents them from sliding around, or toppling over if you have a large stack of them for multiple displays. It can also provide a good way to hide the unit whether under your desk, or somewhere else that has a bit of metal for it to stick to. Just try and keep it away form external hard drives! EVGA UV-19 Detailed FeaturesThis is a photo of the included accessories with the UV-19. EVGA was nice enough to provide a carrying pouch, a retractable USB cord, a DVI-RGB adapter, as well as the book and driver disk.
One item that struck me as being odd was the promotion of the EVGA UV-19 being portable, and this is further conveyed with the carrying pouch and retractable cord. I will get into that more later.
Here you can see the plug for the mini-USB adapter. It is very nice to see that no external power source was necessary. Having to use a power brick, or two USB ports would have been a definite bummer, but EVGA boasts low power consumption on the UV Plus+.
In this photo, you can see the DVI connection. Included is a DVI-RGB adapter for those folks who wish to use older monitors, or make use of the RGB connectors on most HDTVs and Projectors. A DVI-HDMI adapter would have been even better, but not including one helps keep the cost down. As stated before in the Specifications section, the Max display for this device is 1920x1200 for 16:10 Widescreen and 2048x1152 for 16:9 Widescreen. Testing & ResultsTesting MethodologyI tested this system using a Dell Latitude E6510 laptop and a custom built desktop. I tested it in both an office and home setting using the laptop and UV Plus+ 19 alone, as well as the laptop in a Dell docking station with other monitors. Using the desktop, I tested it with two LCD monitors side by side. Test System 1
Test System 2
ResultsI first used the UV Plus+ 19 at work. I typically use two monitors at work, one for my webpages and folder navigation, and the other for email and remote desktops. A third monitor would allow me to keep at least one of those tasks dedicated to its own screen. I chose to put my email on the screen attached to the UV-19. I plugged the USB cable into the device, plugged the other end into my laptop, and within seconds, Windows had popped up saying that it found new hardware, installed it, and was ready to use. I did not have to insert any disks, download any drivers, or even reboot. The UV-19 shows up as a secondary device in the display properties, and can very easily be set to be an extended display in Windows 7. I was also greeted by a new icon in my system tray allowing some minor adjustments to the DisplayLink software. At that point, I moved my Outlook email client window to my third monitor, and it was all set. Within 2 minutes of plugging it in, I was fully up and running with an additional display. At this point, I was not simply content to wait and see if anything exciting happened in my inbox (it rarely does). So I decided to try and do some simple tasks on the UV-19's display. Almost immediately I could notice a difference between the displays connected to my dock versus connected to the UV-19. Dragging windows, minimizing, maximizing, etc. all had a slight sluggishness to them. It was not untolerable, but it was enough that I could tell. Lowering the resolutoin helped, but there still was a slight difference between the hardware accellerated displays connected to my docking station, and the software-accellerated display of the UV-19. Editing documents, writing emails, browsing files and folders was perfectly acceptable by any standard, but as I said before, there was a slight studdering on the UV-19s display. Being that I cannot spend my hours surfing Youtube and Hulu at work, I brought my work laptop home to see how the UV-19 would perform when viewing media files or streaming them from the web. Plugging the UV-19 into the ASUS VH242H monitor was the same simple task as it was at work; no surprises there. I immediately browsed to the folder where I store my recorded TV shows and fired up an episode of "Arrested Development" to test out media playback capability. Windowed mode seemed to perform fairly well. The larger the window was, however, the worse it became. The video became choppy and had to skip and drop frames to keep in sync with the audio. Putting the video in fullscreen mode yielded very choppy playback with tearing, jerky, and skippy playback. Just to be sure, I viewed the same video on both the native laptop LCD and the external display separately. Hulu video was no different. Lowering the resolution on the UV-19 display provided marginally better playback, but full screen was still rather unwatchable. EVGA does have a small trick up their sleeve, though. The DisplayLink software allows an "Optimize for Video" mode. This is meant for the specific purpose of watching full motion, full screen videos on the UV-19. Right-clicking the system tray icon, and checking this option allows the video to play at a much better framerate, but at a cost. The video quality is severely reduced, and obviously pixellated. It is like taking a 800x600 pixel image you find on the web and putting it as your 1920x1200 desktop background, stretched. The video menu overlay that appears when you move your mouse is so blurry, it is practially illegible. The one good thing is that most of this is not noticeable from a large distance. Sitting at your desk 12-18" from your monitor, you will notice all the blurry pixels. but from a distance of 6' or so, it is almost tolerable. All is not lost, however. Deciding that there must be some mistake, and after talking to my editor, I hooked it up to my desktop to see if having something more than the Intel HD onboard video would help. Long story short, it did. Running the monitor on the UV-19 using my desktop showed noticeable improvement when watching full screen videos, whether they be from my local machine, or from the internet. I raised the resolution up to 1680x1050 and while I did notice a slight bit of lag while moving windows, and once in a while, the video would get a little lagged behind the audio, ultimately, it was a much better experience. Using a lower resolution such as 1024x768 and even up to 1280x1024 allowed for perfectly acceptable video playback. Again, I turned on the "Optimize for Video" mode, and it did much of the same as before, allowed a better framerate, but with a large drop in quality. However, the large drop in quality was not worth the framerate increase for this configuration, so it was immediately disabled. This is where the DisplayLink software seems to really take effect. The DisplayLink technology allows the UV-19 to not only utilize the CPU, but the GPU as well. This is the reason behind the large quality and framrate difference between using the onboard Intel HD graphics and the far more powerful Nvidia GTX260. I must confess, I was very pleasantly surprised. UV Plus+ Final ThoughtsDid the EVGA Plus+ UV-19 live up to the expectations we demand from one of the leading display vendors? The UV-19 is very easy to set up and use. It is a very good solution for users that have limited resources, and limited options when it comes to extending their PC system's display. I don't quite understand why EVGA markets this with a portable design, being that even with today's LCD screens being very thin, they are not what I would consider portable, and the UV-19 device may be portable, you still need a display to connect it to. This device can definitely make your life easier when it comes to document creation, web browsing, file and folder organization, etc. Depending on your system, this is also a good product to use if you want to watch videos on a separate display.EVGA UV-19 ConclusionPerformance was perfectly acceptable when working with documents, email, folders, and light web browsing in both configurations.. It fell short on heavy media usage such as full screen media streaming and local media viewing using an onboard video configuration similar to the Dell E6510 laptop, but redeemed itself when attached to a type of setup that allows the DisplayLink to work its magic, such as when it was connected to a Nvidia GTX260. The Appearance is quite attractive. It has a very small footprint and is very aesthecially pleasing. The activity light is pleasantly not distracting. Construction appears to be of sturdy stuff. I see no signs of the device being poorly built, or able to be easily damaged. The Functionality of the device is a bit subjective. If you want to add a simple display to your computer without a lot of fuss, then this functions accordingly. If have a basic system without a lot of horesepower in your graphics card and you need the functionality of a display to play videos or something similar without losing a great deal of detail, you will be disappointed. On the flip side, if you have a decent graphics card with DisplayLink capabilities, you will be pleasantly surprised with how useful this device can be to add an additional display to your system. The Value is again a subjective matter. Currently listed for $89.99 at NewEgg (as well as other retailers), the EVGA UV Plus+ is a relatively inexpensive solution to add an additional monitor to your system. If you have the right configuration, this device can be a great way to boost the current capabilities of your machine. If video on a less-than-capable machine is your main objective, however, the inexpensive price may not outweigh the device's capabilities. I would recommend this to someone who needs to add a display to their system for a wide variety of reasons. If you need full screen videos, consider your machine's current potential. If you have a graphics card that can make use of the DisplayLink technology, then this would be a great way to also watch movies on a separate screen. Pros:
+ Inexpensive Cons:
- Full screen video on machines lacking in graphics processing power leaves much to be desired Ratings:
Final Score: 8.25 out of 10.Questions? Comments? Benchmark Reviews really wants your feedback. We invite you to leave your remarks in our Discussion Forum.
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