I have a Macbook Pro 15” with a high resolution screen which I have connected to an AOC 23” IPS monitor. But I find that even though the monitor & the Macbook provide a good combined screen real estate, you can never have enough! Whilst I would love to go out & purchase a bigger screen, like many we all have budgets. I had a Dell 21” LCD monitor kicking around which was collecting dust. One annoying thing about the Macbooks (not the retina) is you are limited on the number of screens you can connect. So I did some investigation. It seems that there are a number of good USB to VGA/DVI connectors now on the market, but what I wasn’t sure about was whether the frame rate of these devices would work for tools like Revit. It also seems that many of them are Windows only. So in the end I went for this one from a company called Digital Climax (slightly dubious name), but overall an excellent solution.
http://www.climaxdigital.co.uk/epages/BT3449.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/BT3449/Products/111174
It was straight forward to connect up the monitor after installing the drivers. It offers drivers for mac or windows & overall it works very well indeed. You notice a slight lag, but nothing which would really annoy you. If you like twitter feeds & email on screen all the time, then this is a superb option, Youtube & dvd play back is not so good, but this shouldn’t put you off. Be aware though, you will find that there are various USB to VGA/DVI adapters on the market, but make sure that if you need the flexibility of both platforms, mac & pc, they offer drivers which can support both these platforms. I noticed a number of USB 3 to VGA/DVI adapters which would provide better bandwidth but these were Windows only. Overall, a highly recommended solution, especially if you are a laptop user & you need to expand you desktop.
