KYY X90G Quad Portable Monitor Extender Review: 3 Additional Screens

One folds to the left, one to the right, and one to the top; Your laptop (There’s room for up to a 17.3-incher.) You’re supposed to sit in the middle of this arrangement, providing the fourth screen in a quad-screen setup. The screen on top can swivel back so it’s facing away from the user, freeing up the ability to use that screen for presentation purposes (while still giving you three front-facing screens to work with). The panels do not have audio capabilities.

This fully extended thing is a beast, extending about 46 inches (about 4 feet) from side to side and 18 inches vertically. With a weight of 6.4 pounds, it also adds significantly to your travel carry-on, although it’s obviously not designed for use in situations that require true mobility.

Size isn’t the only challenge on the portability front: the KYY X90G also consumes a lot of power – up to 30 watts. If your computer’s USB port can output that amount of wattage, the X90G can be powered via a single USB-C cable connection to one of the two ports on the back panel. My screen seemed to offer enough juice at first, but once I started turning the brightness down to something usable (and drawing more juice), the screens started flickering and failing. Fortunately, KYY includes an additional USB-C cable and power adapter, which ensures that, once plugged into an outlet, you won’t encounter any further power consumption issues. However, it means you’ll likely need access to two AC outlets for a typical laptop setup to work properly — another strike against trying to fire it all up at Starbucks.

Each screen has its own controls, allowing for individual configuration, which is a traditional three-button affair that launches a simple menu system through which you can adjust brightness, color, contrast and adjust the screen position. The default brightness of 30 (out of 100) was too dim to use, but other than that I found the factory settings workable. I tested the X90G with a Windows laptop, and it was easy to arrange the three displays around my central display in the Display Settings control panel to extend the desktop in all directions.

Decision constraints

Photo: Chris Noll

In today’s laptop world, 1080p resolution doesn’t get you very far, and I found this to be the main limiting factor for the device, limiting the usefulness of the three additional displays given the limited amount of content I could fill with each one. Realistically, a minimum resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels is needed to make this extra screen practical for cognitive work, though it’s fine for more casual content.