Do you feel cramped when working on your PC? Could you do with a bit more room for a big worksheet, a video edit or a game? There are two solutions to this: a big, wide-screen monitor or a multi-monitor array. Although large, wide-screen monitors are falling in price all the time, they still cost a lot more than standard sizes. Matrox has a box of tricks that could get you going with a trio of monitors at low cost.

It's really all in the name; TripleHead2Go is a video output splitter which takes a single video signal and directs it to three separate monitors, without you having to fit a special graphics card or even open your PC's case. You don't even need a super-fast adapter already installed, as the device can work with pretty much whatever you already use.

That doesn't mean that if you currently use a bog-standard video chip on your system board the TripleHead2Go will magically give you a 3D game-thrasher. You'll get the same sort of performance you already do, but across three screens. You can use the system with system-board graphics chips, AGP and PCI-E graphics adapters and even dual-head devices using Nvidia SLI, though not ATI's rival Crossfire technology. We reviewed the SVGA version of the product, but for another £20 you can get a digital one, based on DVI.

Set up really couldn't be much easier. The TripleHead2Go box has three sockets to plug in the three screens you want to run and one to take the video output from a PC (or Mac). Plug in the external power supply and it's all set. When the PC's fired up, it uses the centre display to show you what's going on. Run the supplied driver software and, under Windows, call up the display settings panel. Select your new, very wide-screen resolution and suddenly your desktop is stretched across three screens.

The Matrox device supports resolutions of up to 3,840 x 1,024, which is three 1,280 x 1,024 monitors running together, though only 3,072 x 768 if you want more than a 60Hz refresh rate. 60Hz will be enough for LCD monitors, but probably not for older, CRT ones.

The Matrox software implements some useful extras, such as ensuring dialogues from applications open within them on the same screen, rather than hidden away on screen one when the application is on screen three. You can also specify which screen a particular application opens on and so set up desktop configurations that work best for you.

Look at it this way: three brand new 19-inch monitors plus a TripleHead2Go will set you back around £570. A 32-inch wide-screen monitor with a much lower overall resolution will cost between £600 and £1,200, depending on spec. If cost is a factor and your main use will be for PC display rather than playing videos or TV, it's hard to see why you wouldn't go for this excellent big-screen adapter.