Move that noisy and heat-producing workstation 850 feet away from your serene studio with the Matrox Extio F1220, a high-end remote graphics unit (RGU) aimed at broadcasters, audio engineers, mission-critical financial wonks and the well-heeled.
Its price tag is a bit lower than its $2300 Extio F1400 brandmate, and it lets you hook up two 1920×1200 digital (DVI) or analog monitors to its quiet little fanless desktop unit, unlike the F1400 which will let you feed four DVI monitors but only at a resolution of 1600×1200.
https://gizmodo.com/matrox-extio-f1400-takes-remote-workstations-to-the-ext-156679
But Extio lets you do much more than that, offering some intriguing possibilities:
With its 6 USB 2.0 ports and two 1394 FireWire ports, along with integrated audio jacks, you can plug in your speakers, camcorders and external DVD, Blu-ray or HD DVD drives and have them right there at your fingertips. Suddenly that distant, wheezing computer that sounds like a vacuum cleaner is a distant memory unless you need to take a hike to give it a cold boot.
But Extio is expensive. That’s because it all works with a fat fiber optic pipe, sending its signals back and forth with bandwidth to spare, and for that it needs both a PCI card and a PCIe card in the host computer. Plus, there’s 128MB of graphics memory in that desktop unit, too. Hooking up all this tech and making it work perfectly every time can’t be cheap. However, the cost of this technology is destined to plummet, as it always does.
But take look at the technology in this system, and imagine it nestled in a home theater, its quiet little box connected to a 1080p projector and the other end to a remote server with terabytes of HD movies on board. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. The Extio F1220 will be shipping in Q2 of this year.
Product Page [Matrox]
