Low Profile Multi-Display Graphics on the Cheap

Half The Height, But Twice The View

Like most other computer components, graphics cards fall under one of three market categories: consumers, professionals and businesses. Each of these key groups can be broken out into subcategories, which target a specific audience. While we have had articles on professional cards such as ATI FireGL and Nvidia Quadro graphics for the professional graphics user, most of our graphics card reviews focus on Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and gaming enthusiast segments, as most consumer cards will follow the advances of this segment.

We had the opportunity to look at a business application graphics card line from Diamond Multimedia. What is so special about these cards that would draw our attention to the business segment? The BizView MultiView graphics card line combines the functionality of dual displays and keeps a low profile form factor at the same time. This means that users can do exactly what Matrox did with its Dual Head2Go, which allowed a single DVI output to become a double wide screen. BizView cards have a special output and dongle that break out the image onto two screens.

Choose Your BizView

BV300 For PCI Express

Diamond BizView BV300 PCIe

Different situations call for different solutions, and the BizView line of cards make it possible to turn workstations into multi-display work centers. Diamond created two versions of the card to suit two segments interested in multi-display configurations. The BV300 is a PCI Express version that utilizes the processing power of an ATI RV515 graphics core for "2D workstation applications like AutoCAD, Adobe Suite and GIS software."

The ATI RV515LE is the same graphics core used by Radeon X1300 series graphics cards. The core on the BizView BV300 runs at 450 MHz and is accompanied by a 128-bit memory bus and 256 MB of GDDR2, located on the board. The BV300 can be configured to use an additional 256 MB of HyperMemory by allocating 256 MB of system memory for graphics purposes.

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