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Switching monitors between two machines (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
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Hello! I'm in a situation, where I have a work laptop and a personal computer, the latter is used mostly for gaming. In order to switch between them I have to plug all the peripherals from one machine to the other, to help with that I bought a dock, to which I can connect everything, and connect the dock via one USB-C cable. The trouble begins with the monitors, as my laptop supports thunderbolt, but my motherboard doesn't, so it's a bit of a chore to switch them.

To alleviate the issue I'm considering changing my motherboard to one that has thunderbolt 4 support, as I have one 4K monitor and one full HD, and I've read it should support them fine on one cable. Is this a good solution? I'm thinking I might run into some issues with monitors not being connected directly to my GPU, latency or otherwise.

I beseech thee for help o masters of the PC.

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[–] 1 point 3 years ago

I have a very similar situation and i would recommend looking into whether you can connect the monitors to both the dock and the desktop video card.

In my case it was necessary because my screen is 144hz gsync and my dock does not support that, so I needed a way to get that to work.

In theory, my desktop has 3 screens attached. Screen A (144hz) with DP, Screen A with HDMI through the dock, and screen B (just your basic 1080p60hz) with hdmi through the dock.

All you need to do is identify which "screen" is the affected screen(s)'s output through the dock and disable it in the OS and it will work out.

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