USB to VGA/DVI adapters - ever used one?

I have seen them with USB3, then I came across one with USB2! Must be
awfully slow. I wonder what you would use it for.
One place I worked had a cluster with a chilled water heat exchanger
stuck directly behind the rack, so it would have been not feasible to
plug in a DVI connector if techie wanted to troubleshoot a sick node.

wrote:
I have seen them with USB3, then I came across one with USB2! Must be
awfully slow. I wonder what you would use it for.
One place I worked had a cluster with a chilled water heat exchanger
stuck directly behind the rack, so it would have been not feasible to
plug in a DVI connector if techie wanted to troubleshoot a sick node.

It's for adding a low-performance graphics output to
a computer.

A stock trader could use four of them, for example,
and keep charts on four screens.

The USB2 ones are no good for movie playback. If you
have a Powerpoint slide deck playing on the thing,
that might be about as much as it can handle. The data
stream to the USB2 one is compressed, to do as good as
possible with the 30-35MB/sec limits.

The USB3 ones have sufficient datarate, they can handle
a bit more. You might be able to play a movie on one
of those. No, you can't play Crysis on it :-)

The devices are typically "composite" and have a fake CDROM
drive as one of the devices inside the dongle. This has drivers
for Windows desktop OSes only. Upon plugin, the Autoplay feature
in Windows, loads the drivers from the dongle. For any
other hardware combinations, seek advice on drivers first.
(Check the manufacturer site for a list of validated platforms.)

There were a couple Samsung??? monitors with the same chip
inside, where plugging in the monitor via a USB cable,
would immediately yield an image. I don't think that feature
lasted very long, and you might not find one like that today.

Paul

On Saturday, November 24, 2018 at 10:25:53 PM UTC+8, Paul wrote:

It's for adding a low-performance graphics output to
a computer.

A stock trader could use four of them, for example,
and keep charts on four screens.

I would think a PCI-E X1 card would be better for an extra screen
of plots.
Looking up these things, I find that some mainboards don't work with
them unfortunately.