Do I need an onbard GPU to use Display Link?

[mick]

After more than a week my new Kensington Universal Multi-Display Adapter (with DL-195) finally arrived in the mail from a supposedly Aussie online retailer.

After testing it for few days, I'm happy to report that it works great! Following is a short review...

The OS X driver on the supplied CD was quite outdated and could not be installed (incorrectly detecting the MacBook Pro as a non intel Mac). Downloading and installing the current version 1.8 driver from the DisplayLink website did the trick.

After rebooting and connecting the Kensington adapter to a Samsung 24" display, OS X seemed to automatically configure the new Kensington display as the primary display (probably since the internal display is broken) with full 1920 x 1080 resolution. Obviously the boot-up is not visible on the Kensington display (since the USB driver needs to be loaded first), but it switches on at the log-on screen.

Colour and image quality are excellent, dragging windows shows a tiny fraction of lag, while watching movies (YouTube or TV through an elegato eyeTV) at full resolution is not enjoyable. Still, the product can't be faulted for running office apps, browsing the web, checking email, and even using Photoshop, and thus extending the life of a four year old MacBook Pro that would otherwise have joined the scrap heap.

Note to other MacBook Pro users: the only way I could install the DisplayLink driver was through a remote desktop connection (because the internal graphics card is broken), which assumed "Screen Sharing" (with VNC in this case) was previously enabled. It might be possible to install (or at least setup Screen Sharing) through a "Remote Login" (ssh) session, but I can't confirm this.

Note to DisplayLink team: thanks for a great product! Even if in the future you upgrade the OS X driver to also use the internal GPU, make sure to keep a version without this feature to cater for users with broken laptop GPU's.

Cheers,

Mick