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Old 06-18-2013, 04:19 PM   #1
Reynolds.DST
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Default Windows 7 x64, NVidia, and Dell M6700

Hello,

This is my first post on this forum so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Rob and I work as a Desktop Support Technician for my company. I've been given the task of researching a display solution for our CEO and have run into a few issues that I was hoping to hear some input from DisplayLink on.

Let me start out by saying that we use the Plugable USB2.0 to DVI converters on all of our Dell E6400 and M4400 laptops for users who require the use of a third monitor and they work very well. Because Dell only makes port replicators and not docking stations for these laptops, our list of options was thin. Our initial solution was the Tritton SEE2Xtreme adapters and they were extremely disappointing, however we are very impressed with the quality and reliability of the DisplayLink enabled Plugable adapters and have had little to no issues so far.

The problem we have run into stems from a request made by our CEO. His requirements are to have a laptop that can do 4x monitors at 2560x1600 resolution. On a desktop this request would be very easy as any video card with 2x DisplayPort 1.2 enabled ports can easily push this to 4x monitors via a HUB or daisy chaining. This would be using either AMD Eyefinity or in our case NVidia's version of the MST technology.

Unfortunately because of his request for a laptop this has become more difficult than expected. Because the M6700 also uses a port replicator we are limited in our options. There is only one true DisplayPort on the laptop (even though there are two on the replicator) and because of this we are only able to get 3x monitors at 2560x1600 on the Dell U3014s.

To counter this problem, we bought the DisplayPort to USB 3.0 adapter (P/N: USB32DPPRO) to enable the use of a fourth monitor at 2560x1600. The device allows us to get that resolution, but it disables the Aero theme and all of the NVidia control panel options appear to be missing except for Stereoscopic 3D (essentially useless for us). When using just 2x native + the adapter monitor, the Aero theme retains but the NVidia control panel options are still missing.

What's interesting is that we get similar results when removing the adapter and attempting to force daisy chain 2x monitors on each replicator DisplayPort (4 total). The Aero theme disappears (although NVidia control panel is still there) and we get very poor video performance the same as using the adapter. This makes me wonder how the DisplayLink drivers and adapter actually push video, and if they are stealing resources from the GPU as opposed to RAM or something else.

I should note that this laptop is using the 4GB version of the K5000M laptop graphics card, and we get similar results regardless of whether or not Optimus is enabled.

Our main questions to DisplayLink are:

-Does the adapter utilize the GPU to push video?
-Is there a way to allocate more resources like RAM to get better performance?
-Is there a fix for NVidia Control Panel missing once the USB adapter is plugged in? I believe the oldest driver for that card is 311.xx so rollback may not be an option for us.

Any replies or advice would be greatly appreciated as we are being pushed to come up with some answers and are having a hard time figuring out why the video quality is so poor with 4 monitors in any given configuration.

Also, we would like to get a laptop with 2x true DisplayPort 1.2 ports natively but I don't think there are any on the market right now. We go through Dell for all of our OEM solutions and they do not make a laptop that can fulfill his request, the M6700 being the closest solution they offer.
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Old 06-24-2013, 09:15 PM   #2
Reynolds.DST
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Still looking for a solution... we are going to try an M6700 with an ATi card instead once the order arrives from Dell. Any input at this point would be very helpful.

Last edited by Reynolds.DST; 06-24-2013 at 09:43 PM.
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Old 07-01-2013, 05:30 AM   #3
dragon788
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http://www.displaylink.com/shop/docks

DL-3900 does dual display up to the resolution you need I think. Its USB3 so should work on any laptop. See the resolution limits on the list. I don't think they are manufacturer specific, and a trial dock is a lot cheaper than an entirely new non-standard laptop.
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Old 07-03-2013, 07:16 PM   #4
Reynolds.DST
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Dragon788,

Thank you for your reply! I'm uncertain as to which device we would be looking to buy from the list, but either way I'm not sure it would be a very good solution. Without buying one to test on the main question would be how does the performance differ between the USB 3.0 dock and the USB 3.0 to DisplayPort adapter which we've already purchased?

Another thing to note:

We had Dell send us a test system with the ATi card and that also had very similar results. The drivers seemed to remain the same but the Aero theme disabled and we got poor performance from the system once all 4 monitors were at 2560x1600.

We'd really like to know if there's an .inf file we could edit to allocate more RAM or processing power for the display to increase performance, or something along those lines...
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Old 07-07-2013, 09:06 PM   #5
dragon788
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Those are some pretty steep requirements for a single portable machine. One thing you might investigate is adding a second machine on/under his desk and running Multiplicity (Stardock product) or Synergy (Free Open Source multi-platform) or InputDirector (free for non-commercial) so that you split the load across both machines and can run dual monitors from each. My biggest issue with the M4700/M6700 has been that the Nvidia cards are supposed to be able to do 4 monitors themselves, but there doesn't seem to be an option to disable the built in LCD and just drive 4 externals.
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