Hello EVERYONE!
Happy to announce I got both of my 4K 144Hz monitors the day and love them to death. But I was wondering if y’all or the Eve team has recommendations for laptop docks?
I wouldn’t recommend using a laptop dock if you want 144Hz. In order to drive all of the various USB and network ports, the dock will use 2 of the 4 high-speed data lines in the USB-C cable. This will only leave 2 data lanes for video, with a max refresh rate of around 60Hz.
What’s worse, if you want to have both Spectrums plugged into the same laptop dock, they’d be sharing those 2 high-speed lanes. In other words, they’d get a single lane each, with a maximum refresh rate of 30Hz.
The only way that you’d get higher refresh rates from a dock is if it only used the dedicated low-speed USB 2.0 data lines to drive the extra ports in the dock. The high-speed lanes would then carry only video signal. However, I don’t know if any such laptop dock exists.
I did some research about multiple Monitor support on Apple M1 pro, because Apple thought it would be a good idea to only allow 2 External Displays for the M1 pro… god damn Apple.
There seems to be a way to get around this restriction with DisplayLink Docks.
Has anyone tried that before? Seems like to even work with the macbook air.
The displaylink solution still works, I use my m1 MacBook Air with 3x 4k at 60hz. The center monitor is connected trough thunderbolt/DisplayPort usb-c and the other usb-c cable goes into a docking station that provides 2 more hdmi/DisplayPort outs for the other 2 displays. I’m not sure if it would work with things like video editing as displaylink does use some cpu, but for myself as a developer it works perfectly.
Here is a reddit post: