( 6 reviews )
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Posted: Feb 9 2009
This is a well-assembled and high-quality product as far as cables go, typical of a Cables Unlimited product, but it was useless and will likely be useless to you. I have a two-monitor setup on my PC and wanted to duplicate the output of one my monitors to an LCD HDTV. The product comes with no real instructions, no support whatsoever, and the manufacturer hasn't bothered to tell people about the many limitations of this product. The result for me was many frustrating hours trying to get it to work. I have decided to return this product and purchase a powered DVI splitter from Monoprice. If you are even considering this product, here are some things you should know: 1) The product will only work for splitting a DVI signal from a "Dual-Link" DVI port. What that means is that if you're using it to split the output of a DVI port on your PC, for example, your PC's video card must output Dual-Link DVI through that port. Now Dual-Link doesn't mean that your card has two DVI ports. It is a special output mode for DVI digital signals where the video signal is sent through two sets of pins on your DVI cable. This passive (non-powered) splitter essentially relies on the redundant signal transmitted through the second set of pins to be able to output the same signal to two displays. Many video cards only output Single-Link DVI, not Dual-Link, and it is not always easy to find out if your video card supports Dual-Link DVI. Some cards claim "Dual-Link DVI," but they're mistakenly referring to the fact that the card has two DVI ports. Finding out whether your video card supports true "Dual-Link" DVI is a challenging task, trust me, especially if your video card is a couple of years old. I ended up replacing my nVidia video card with an ATI card to gain true Dual-Link DVI support, but it still didn't work for the reasons explained in (3) below. 2) This supports only DVI-D, meaning it works only with digital devices. The DVI standard can support analog outputs (to a VGA-type device), but that doesn't work for this device. 3) Even if you get a true Dual-Link DVI-D output through your video card, it still may not work. This is because your PC may not be able to deal with the fact that you have two devices connected through one DVI port. When you plug something into your PC's video card, the computer tries to figure out what type of device it is talking to so it can determine the available resolutions, refresh rate, etc., for that device. On my system, this identification step fails when I have the splitter plugged in, presumably because the computer can't figure out what the device actually is, so it determines that nothing is there. (The only way to get it to work on my computer is to plug in just the monitor without the splitter and then hot-swap the splitter, which fools the video card into skipping the identification step so it thinks it's still talking to just the monitor.) The mere existence of this product is misleading in that it suggests that splitting a DVI video signal across two displays is simple and straightforward. For most people, it isn't. A powered DVI 1x2 splitter from [...] will cost more ([...]), but will actually work.
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Posted: May 31 2008
This is a solid cable, and as others have commented, it does split the image. However, it has some technical requirements that the company seems to have no interest in sharing: Issue 1: You MUST have a dual-link DVI port on your computer. Many graphics cards that have two ports will have both a single-link DVI port, and a dual-link DVI port (like some for the MacPro). If you do not have a Dual-link port, your computer will not put out enough juice to split the signal. Issue 2: Mac OS X uses an auto-detect to determine what monitor is attached and what resolution signal to send. It appears as though the cable has a primary side and a secondary side, so that only one monitor talks to the computer. OSX correctly identified 1920x1080 for my HDTV, but would not let me scale the output down to the 1680x1050 required of my monitor. (My computer monitor never accepted the signal from either output, even when it was the only thing plugged into it.) All told, if you are trying to rig up a cheap man's DVI switch between two different devices (like a monitor and a TV) pay the money for a switch because this cable is built for one purpose only: splitting a single signal to two similar displays.
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Posted: Dec 17 2007
It splits the signal as it's designed to, you can't complain there. You need your devices to be able to use it though, which can be an issue.
