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Six monitors on laptop

ATiRubyfan

ATiRubyfan

ATiRubyfan

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Joined
26 Dec 2020
Posts
183
Evening all.

I have been tasked at work with finding a DELL / LENOVO laptop or a laptop solution ( with docks, daisy chain or external GPU ) to support six 1080p monitors.

Can anyone give me some suggestions ?

Thanks.
 
ATiRubyfan said:
Evening all.

I have been tasked at work with finding a DELL / LENOVO laptop or a laptop solution ( with docks, daisy chain or external GPU ) to support six 1080p monitors.

Can anyone give me some suggestions ?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Six ! why a laptop. i have never done more then three of a laptop. DP Daisy chaining for two of them and one of the HDMI.
 
If your going down the laptop route it's going to be expensive as you will need a laptop with two displayport outputs each connected to a MST hub (like the HP Omen 17).
 
As it's a fairly neiche thing, guessing only one or two employees would need a setup like that, a custom desktop pc is the obvious answer.

Employers seem obsessed with laptops for some reason. Laptops are only good for one thing, being portable. Everything else is a major compromise.
 
There is only one time I can thank the work laptop for being a laptop as it has happened twice to me.

These times have been when the building has lost power and otherwise I would have lost work or been unable to work for a period of time.

I don't like laptops to work from period. As @mattyfez says they are meant to be portable, and my job does require me to be portable so that's that. However some people get laptops and they sit stationary like a desktop always plugged in (which cant be good for the battery).
 
Plugable make USB 3.0 graphics adapters.

For example, they advertise that their UGA-3000 supports up to six 1080p displays (one 1080p display per adapter). They also do higher resolution 4K30 HDMI and DisplayPort adapters.

I haven't used them so have no idea how well they work.
 
ATiRubyfan said:
Can anyone give me some suggestions ?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Like someone else has said

The new Apple Macbook M1 Max is meant to be able to run six monitors
Guessing you need to lookup what monitors would support doing this with the Macbook M1 max as they may need to have USB-C or thunderbolt inputs
 
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We use to use EVGA UVPLUS+39 UDB3.0 dongles. They provided an additional HDMI and DVI port. I am not sure of the max resolution, as we only used them with 1920x1200 and 1080p monitors.

They seemed to work fine, even video playback worked well. (We had Startech dongles before which would choke even on a Youtube video)

So if your laptop supports 2 monitors stock, adding 2x USB3.0 dongles like that would get you 6x for very little money.

You didnt mention however what resolution the 6x monitors need to run at, or what content would be placed on them. That may or may not rule out using USB3.0 dongles...
 
mattyfez said:
As it's a fairly neiche thing, guessing only one or two employees would need a setup like that, a custom desktop pc is the obvious answer.

Employers seem obsessed with laptops for some reason. Laptops are only good for one thing, being portable. Everything else is a major compromise.
Click to expand...

Yup... Our whole dev team had our desktops replaced with laptops a few years ago.

We have constant overheating issues during the summer, problems with docks failing, performance issues and full SSDs (which can't really be upgraded easily), plenty of bulging batteries being replaced (several so bad they've actually pushed the touch pad out of the chassis!)

Meanwhile, the laptops spend 365 days a year sat on our desks, switched on, plugged into a dock. Since we started WFH last March, it has been sat on my desk in the office while I RDP into it. I assume its hasn't caught fire yet since it still works, but surely having that many batteries sat there on constant charge overheating is a fire hazard, never mind the state of the battery health?!
 
mattyfez said:
As it's a fairly neiche thing, guessing only one or two employees would need a setup like that, a custom desktop pc is the obvious answer.

Employers seem obsessed with laptops for some reason. Laptops are only good for one thing, being portable. Everything else is a major compromise.
Click to expand...

(Laptops are only good for one thing, being portable. Everything else is a major compromise.) Exactly :)
 
I was asked this at an interview. The said company wanted me to create a guide as to how six monitors could be connected to a laptop for their traders.

I suggested this after lot of digging around :

- DELL Vostro 7510 laptop [Intel® Core™ i7-11800H , 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, 15.6-inch FHD display, NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3050 , 1 X ThunderBolt™ 4 port ]

- 6 X Monitors capable of running at 1920 X 1080 resolution , where 5 X monitors have Displayport DP input while 1 X monitor has HDMI input

- Dell Thunderbolt Docking station – WD19TBS

- StarTech.com 4 X Port DisplayPort MST Hub

- Dell docking station is plugged into the mains. At the back, one of the DP ports is connected to a monitor while the HDMI port is connected to the monitor with the HDMI port. The Startech hub is connected to the other DP port and four monitors are connected to each DP port on the hub.

If budget was not an issue, I would have suggsted an external graphics card.
 
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