Options for external monitors on dual booting laptop with only VGA and HDMI
2014-07
Misconstruction
About a year ago I purchased a fancy new core i7 SSD laptop with nvidia optimus geforce 660M. It's still dual booting windows 7 and ubuntu flawlessly.
There's one major problem though - the lack of ports for connecting external displays, the laptop having only VGA and HDMI. Since I'm often sitting long hours in front of the laptop, using the rather poor build-in display hurts my neck, back and shoulders. So I'm looking for options for expanding my screen real estate using external monitors.
Had I been using only windows I would simply have purchased a USB3-DVI-D converter and connected to one or two 2556x1440 displays - however since linux does not support this display link chip, this is not an option. It's a no-brand laptop, so there's also no official dock available.
Ideally I would like to connect either a 2556x1440 display, but two 1920x1200 displays on a VESA mount is also a possibility (even though that's way more expensive in terms of hardware).
This leaves the following options:
1) Using the good-ol' VGA: The main problem with this is the image quality, I've tried a variety of cables, but the image is always very fuzzy. Also limited to 1920x1200. Is there a way to preserve the image quality of VGA as much as possible?
2) Using HDMI to connect to a 2556x1440 display with a lower refresh rate: After some digging online, I found a few mentions of people driving 2556x1440 monitors using an HDMI port and a high-speed HDMI cable, by creating a custom resolution with lower refresh rate: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2037954 http://forum.notebookreview.com/accessories/734218-solved-outputting-2560x1440-1440p-signal-via-hdmi-output.html Does the DELL U2713H support 2560 x 1440 over HDMI @ 60fps Since this is based on a possibly buggy manual configuration I'm a bit skeptical. How important is the refresh rate, is 30hz or 50hz tolerable? I'm not doing any gaming, mainly just looking at browsers and terminals.
3) Use a display-link usb adapter: Apparently, the new version of Ubuntu has built-in support the low-resolution display link chips, although I haven't seen any people actually reporting it working. I'm a bit worried about the quality of the display - is there a degradation of the quality to allow transfer across USB 2?
Maybe I have missed some other options?
I was hoping the smart people here would have some useful insight on what option is best!
Somebody still uses you MS-DOS
I have a HP dv9830us laptop. It has a vga-out and a hdmi-out port.
I want to know if it's possible to use 3 devices, each one with different displays, using just one graphic card - NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS? (Original, vga with an external monitor and hdmi with a full hd tv). Where I can find this kind of information?
If not possible, I would like to know alternatives like:
- "Usb" solutions to be possible to connect to the external lcd or to a TV. The TV should be flawless, but the second monitor can have slow response times; (I've found some Usb Video adapters, do these units really work?)
- Cheap PCMCIA video cards to be possible to connect to an external monitor, so I would use the hdmi with the tv and this second video card to output to another monitor.
I'm using Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. Is this possible in both systems?
davr
Both Windows and Linux support 3 displays just fine. As for if your hardware supports it, my guess is that it is unlikely, especially on a laptop. Probably to save on costs it only supports a single external display, and not both. Of course you could always try, if it doesn't work, you've only lost $5 to buy the cable (assuming you don't already have one, and you don't buy it from some ripoff place like BestBuy)