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    Multiple USB Monitors- What helps most? Ram? Graphics? Fan?

    Discussion in 'Accessories' started by kneehowguys, Sep 30, 2015.

  1. kneehowguys

    kneehowguys Notebook Evangelist

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    I'll be looking for a laptop with a numpad and can handle those 2 simultaneous USB monitors in this link
    http://www.slidenjoy.com/ AND still run well

    upload_2015-9-30_0-56-41.png

    What are your thoughts on these?

    1. Lenovo T550 or w550s look like alright options because numpad + replaceable battery. Somewhat afraid of laptop draining battery fast during office hours or another situation. And perhaps waiting until skylake. Either a numpad or a bunch of USB ports would be useful (since if no numpad, could use a USB numpad)

    2. What is important to look for in the specs of a laptop? RAM? Graphics (what to look for in particular?) A good fan? How do you compare fans anyhow? I imagine multiple USB 3.0's could be useful in case 1 proves to be not enough despite slidenjoy's claim

    3. What are other problems do you foresee?
     
  2. Kent T

    Kent T Notebook Virtuoso

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    Lenovo is good in these models. Because you need no stinking USB and it's glitches. Buy the docking station. The consumer and gaming machines don't have it. Get the better GPU. and more RAM than standard, and do what needs doing.
     
  3. nipsen

    nipsen Notebook Ditty

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    That's.. kind of a neat idea. Utterly pointless for my use of a laptop, but a good idea. :)

    What you will run into is that usb 3 will have.. basically.. more than enough bandwidth to actually display a pretty solid video-feed from some virtual desktop area. But there will be lag. And there will be response glitching. Nevertheless - not an altogether terrible idea. I'd love to like to see some thin, super-light side-panels with touch for widgets and things like that. Even though that's also pretty useless :D But you could run logs and stuff like that on it I guess. A chat bar. Some news-scroll. E-mail. Status-updates collected in one place.

    Hardware requirement is essentially very low. You need a decent amount of ram so the OS (read: Windows) won't use so much swap that the rest of the operation croaks. Otherwise, it's going to be based around the processor. If there's some hardware compression, it's likely not going to be based around gpu or opencl routines.

    So if you wanted three monitors with perfect response, then it would be done via a pci-e interface. But even if that's actually possible, I don't see anyone actually making that pci-e external connector without bundling it with a dock, like Lenovo has. Because anything else would be squeezing out the toothpaste from the tube too fast or something, I don't know.