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Zotac launches DisplayPort to dual HDMI adapters
If there's one market where things moves slowly, as in slower than paint drying, then it's the display interface industry as it's the year 2011 and we're still using a display connector that first came out in 1987, namely the good old D-sub. This was meant to be replaced by the DVI port and more recently both ports were said to be replaced by the DisplayPort connector by 2015 or there abouts. So what does this have to do with anything? Well, Zotac has come up with a pair of nifty adapters for anyone that happens to own a pair of HDMI equipped displays and a graphics card with only a DisplayPort connector.
If there's one market where things moves slowly, as in slower than paint drying, then it's the display interface industry as it's the year 2011 and we're still using a display connector that first came out in 1987, namely the good old D-sub. This was meant to be replaced by the DVI port and more recently both ports were said to be replaced by the DisplayPort connector by 2015 or there abouts. So what does this have to do with anything? Well, Zotac has come up with a pair of nifty adapters for anyone that happens to own a pair of HDMI equipped displays and a graphics card with only a DisplayPort connector.
So ok, it's hugely unlikely that this will ever be the case, but it's good to see a company that's willing to move forward. Considering that DisplayPort isn't directly compatible with DVI and HDMI (both of which are very similar to each other), adapters like these will be needed. There are already plenty of adapters available in the market, but none quite like these.
Each of the new adaptors plug into either a mini DisplayPort or a standard size DisplayPort connector and then give you a pair of HDMI ports in the other end. This in itself might not sound all that special, until you realise that you can run a pair of HDMI screens of a single DisplayPort connector. This is potentially very useful for someone with a motherboard with integrated graphics that wants to run three screens, something that isn't possible without adding a graphics card in most cases. Plug in one of Zotac's new adapters and you can, at least as long as your motherboard has one DisplayPort and at least one other display interface.
There is a drawback though, Zotac's adapters are limited to 1920x1080 resolution per screen, but at least there's support for spanning so 3840x1080 is doable. The adapters also work with notebooks and we can see quite a few notebook users being interested in these, as you don't tend to have a wealth of display interfaces on notebooks and this makes it tricky to run more than one display. It might not be the perfect solution, but it's still a much better one than what's currently available. No word on pricing as yet, but we'd expect the new adapters to be more expensive than current single port adapters.
Update: The price for either adapter is US$50 which seems a bit on the steep side.
Source: Zotac
