this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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PC Master Race

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Switching monitors between two machines (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 year ago by Cheery@lemmy.sdf.org 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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[–] SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see a couple of people suggesting that you use a KVM. If you go that route, make sure you get one that matches your refresh rate, or you will be stuck at 20-30hz.

If you have the ports, you can connect the computers via different ports on the monitors and use the monitor buttons to swap between. A KVM would still be useful to move the mouse and keyboard.

[–] Cheery@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I do have free ports, so sounds like a plan, any KVM switches you'd suggest?

[–] SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 1 points 1 year ago

Nope. It can be as cheap as you can tolerate in this situation

[–] SteveTech@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

They're not cheap, and I only know of it because of their YouTube channel, but the Level 1 Techs ones seem pretty good.

Some on this page.