Source: DisplayLink

We’re filling out our line of DisplayLink USB graphics adapters with two new products that offer even better pricing, using DisplayLink’s most cost-effective mid-range DL-165 chip.

1) Our new UGA-165 completes our USB to VGA/DVI/HDMI family. There are all identical products other than the DisplayLink chip inside the unit: UGA-2K-A (DL-195 chip), UGA-165 (DL-165 chip), and UGA-125 (DL-125 chip).

2) Our new USB-VGA-165 is our most aggressively priced product, hitting the new price point of $44.95, while still being built on DisplayLink’s mid-range DL-165 chip. We pushed the price point down by supporting VGA connections only (no DVI or HDMI, and no extra converters needed in the box), and with simpler casing and packaging.

Now with this complete line, we’re covering the full line of DisplayLink chips, with options from $45-$65. And we hope to add a higher end option focused on HDMI in the coming months.

If you’re a current owner of one of our other DisplayLink products, you’re going to like these new adapters — same drivers, same performance, same simple setup experience, and new lower price points for connecting even more monitors to your PC!

Here’s a table with more detail to compare the four adapters head-to-head.

Model UGA-2K-A	Model UGA-165	Model UGA-125	Model USB-VGA-165
USB 2.0 to VGA, DVI, HDMI	USB 2.0 to VGA, DVI, HDMI	USB 2.0 to VGA, DVI, HDMI	USB 2.0 to VGA
DisplayLink DL-195 Chip	DisplayLink DL-165 Chip	DisplayLink DL-125 Chip	DisplayLink DL-165 Chip
Modes up to 1920×1200 or 2048×1152 (wide)	Modes up to 1600×1200 or 1920×1080 (wide)	Modes up to 1280×1024 or 1440×900 (wide)	Modes up to 1600×1200 or 1920×1080 (wide)
Power/Activity LED. Included DVI->VGA and DVI->HDMI Adapters	Power/Activity LED. Included DVI->VGA and DVI->HDMI Adapters	Power/Activity LED. Included DVI->VGA and DVI->HDMI Adapters	No LED. VGA Only. Simpler Packaging
Supported by latest DisplayLink drivers	Supported by latest DisplayLink drivers	Supported by latest DisplayLink drivers	Supported by latest DisplayLink drivers
More info …	More info …	More info …	More info …

]]> http://plugable.com/2010/12/02/plugable-adds-to-its-line-of-displaylink-usb-graphics-adapters/feed/ 2 http://plugable.com/2010/09/17/happy-birthday-plugable/ http://plugable.com/2010/09/17/happy-birthday-plugable/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:24:47 +0000 Bernie Thompson http://plugable.com/?p=1439 Plugable Technologies brought its first product to market a year ago this month.

We’re humbled by and extremely appreciative of the more than 2000 customers we’ve served since then. Thank you!!

As a way of celebrating, we’re dropping prices on two of our lead products, just for a limited time from now until September 30th.

The Plugable UGA-2K-A (DisplayLink 195 chipset), which was previously $69.95 is now $57.20.
The Plugable UGA-125 (DisplayLink 125 chipset), which was previously $49.95 is now $46.20.

Thank you so much for your support of Plugable. We’re in this for you, and we very much appreciate your going out of your way to choose our products!

Some of our favorite tips from the article:

• Turn on Window’s “Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key” feature
• The hotkey Win-[up, down, left, right] for maximizing, restoring and moving windows across monitors
• Their recommended links to find cool multimonitor wallpaper

In any case, it’s a must-read post for the multi-monitor aficionado.

DisplayLink users on Mac might want to hold off on Apple’s update until any problems are shaken out.

The DisplayLink DL-195 chip inside this adapter is the best high-end chip out there for adding a display over USB. And because it pushes USB 2.0 and analog VGA to their limits, it isn’t likely to be beaten by any other chip in the USB 2.0 generation.

For this new adapter from Plugable, we wanted to offer that high-end choice, and also make sure that everything else about the adapter package itself meets or beats any alternative out there.

• The Plugable UGA-2K-A includes a DVI->HDMI adapter (in addition to the usual DVI->VGA adapter)
• The latest drivers are available on Windows Update and from displaylink.com
• Open source available, so there’ll be new software written for this device, even years from now
• Public problem reporting and support, so you can always get the full story about the product
• Amazon’s fast shipping and A-to-z guarantee on your purchase

In future posts, we’ll cover some of the cool things this device can do by enabling many displays on any PC (things like create the ultimate day-traders’ war-room, with many displays built around a single laptop).

Until then, you can read more about the product launch in the stuffily worded press release here. And more on the product page at http://plugable.com/products/uga-2k-a/.

The xorg generic fbdev driver (xf86-video-fbdev) supports rotation with a custom option (note it disables DGA and xrandr when it rotated mode). DisplayLink devices can use this driver two ways:

• With the udlfb fb_defio option enabled to detect framebuffer writes based on page faults
• With the fbdev xorg server patched to report damage (writes to the framebuffer). Instructions for compiling and adding the ReportDamage option to xorg.conf are at the end of this post.

To enable rotation, in the xorg.conf “Device” section, add a Rotate option, setting it to CW, CCW, or UD.

Section "Device"
  Identifier "dl"
  Driver "fbdev"
  Option "rotate" "CCW"
  Option "ReportDamage" "true"
  Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb1"
EndSection

One downside is rendering is significantly slower, as the extra work of rotation is done at the X level and the page-fault behavior of defio means even small updates refresh much of the screen. Here’s some numbers that can be compared to earlier posts (in non-rotate mode):

bernie@bernie-aspireone:~/git/misc-udlfb$ ./udlfb-perf.sh fb0 gtkperf -a
Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":3.0".
GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Fri Jan  1 09:47:20 2010
 
GtkEntry - time:  0.00
GtkComboBox - time:  3.73
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  2.08
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.49
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.69
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.47
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.44
GtkRadioButton - time:  0.79
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  2.30
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  1.24
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  4.14
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  4.56
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  4.11
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.90
 ---
Total time: 25.96
 
Quitting..
 
model name      : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270   @ 1.60GHz
model name      : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270   @ 1.60GHz
cpu MHz         : 800.000
cpu MHz         : 800.000
MemTotal:        2052144 kB
Framebuffer Mode: 1920,1080
 
Rendered bytes:  1238913024 (total pixels * Bpp)
Identical bytes: 1070725304 (skipped via shadow buffer check)
sent bytes:      125732225 (compressed usb data, including overhead)
K CPU cycles:    7478653 (transpired, may include context switches)
 
% pixels found to be unchanged: 86.00 %
Compression of changed pixels : 25.00 %
Total CPU cycles spent per input pixel: 6
Total CPU cycles spent per output pixel: 59
USB Mbps: 35.52 (theoretical USB 2.0 peak 480)