I had a customer who wanted to buy a PC so he could play flight simulator.

He said he would buy from me, but he ended up buying from Dick Smith… But thats OK.

He asked me to help setup the system, but I soon started noticing some shortfalls in the system.

First of all, it had built-in video, but he had purchased a decent video card, so it should be OK.

But then he said he wanted to run 3 monitors… but the PC only had 1 PCI-E slot… so that meant only 2 monitors…

The salesman had told him that he could “easily” plug a monitor into a USB port via an adapter…

I don’t like where this was going…

After a bit of research, I found that the best option was the UV Plus+ 16 (UV-16).

So I ordered it, and gave it a test run.

It worked well.

It got confused initially, as it started an online update soon after the install, but once the software was updated (it felt slow to update, with often no on-screen indication of the update progress.

The adapter is actually quite small, and I liked that.

I also did some video stress-testing… and the UV-16 never got hotter than luke warm.

Of course the video speed is not as fast as a dedicated video solution… even the built-in video adapter on a 5 year old PC is faster… but that can’t be helped, as USB speeds are just not fast enough to handle real video bandwidths.

So the verdict:

I wouldn’t use it as a main display, but its great for allowing an extra monitor that doesn’t need to display a lot of fast-changing graphics (eg the instruments on flight simulator).

The only other negative is the cost, as its more expensive than most low-end video cards… so its only a good solution if you just cannot get a video card into a PC (eg some older PCs have absolutely no video card slot).