Performance -
Testing something like the Diamond V-Stream WCPTVPRO will incorporation multiple facets. The one that most people will be concerned with is video quality, but no less important are range and battery life. If you drop the WCPTVPRO into your laptop and it cuts battery life in half it is not going to be of as much use as a more efficient product. Range is also very important; if you are limited to 5 feet then what is the point of paying for a device to give you more distance (unless you are just that concerned about cables. To test these we used a couple of different types of video output to ensure that the WPCTVPRO was up to the task of sending a wide array of video to your monitor. We used our Samsung Series 7 Chronos (NP780Z5E-S01UB) laptop. The Chronos is not stock as we have upgraded it to 12GB of RAM and added in an ADATA 256GB SX900  which makes things a little snappier than the original 8GB and 1TB 5400RPM HDD. This new configuration also improved battery life so our results will be different than someone using a stock Series 7 Chronos.
For our first test run we started about 7-feet away from our display unit. This is a 50-Inch Panasonic Viera S1 (TC-P50S1). Our test medium was going to be Netflix streaming, but we ran into a small problem.

Fortunately this was easy to resolve. The drivers that ship with the WCPTVPRO are not truly meant for Windows 8 which causes them to fail if used for some streaming media applications (we saw that same thing with Amazon Prime). If you are running Windows 8 you will want to grab the latest version of the Display Link drivers from Diamond’s website… in fact you should probably do this no matter what OS you are using as they do provide some stability and performance fixes.

After that we watched Netflix video until the battery hit 20% (from a full charge). This gave us about 4.5 hours of viewing time which is not that much different from the 5+ hours we get normally using the same test on the local display. Pushing an Amazon Prime Full HD (1080p) video was still solid, but here the batter drain was much more obvious with a life of just under 4 hours.

The next stop was at 15 Feet where the video began to get a little choppy and the power used to push the 1080p video started to have an impact on battery life. Here our battery only lasted around 3 hours (2 hours 48 minutes) for NetFlix and just over 2 for Amazon.

Outside 15 feet the video was so choppy (and audio began to stutter) that it was not worth the effort. We still had good line of site, but it did not make any difference.

We tried gaming using the WPCTVPRO, but none of the games we tried (Civilization V, Napoleon Total War, HalfLife) would use the remote display. Typically we would get a black screen or the game would crash back to the desktop. As the DisplayLink adapter does not support DirectX this was not surprising. We imagine that some of the basic Windows 8 games will work, but nothing that requires advanced graphics.