I have a rack mounted gaming PC, living about 20 meters away from my office to which I ran an optical display port 1.4 cable and an active USB 3.0 cable.
I’ve been using it fine with a cheapo USB Switch to toggle between my work laptop and gaming PC, plus changing the source on my monitor. I just replaced that with the lvl1techs 2 port KVM, and I have two issues :
My keyboard (roccat mk fx) does not work on the HID Ports at all. Works fine on non HID Ports. My mouse works on them so presumably that means my keyboard isn’t standard HID and I’ll have to get a new one ?
My monitor is the alienware QD OLED, I’ve been running it at 1440p 144 Hz in 1000 nit hdr mode over that optical cable. I have a couple of keystone displayport connectors in line that degrade the signal a bit so there is an active DP extender, but that worked at 144 Hz so far. Through the KVM it’s only showing 60 Hz in the windows dropdown. Any idea why the KVM seems to be hiding all the other modes ? I even tried dropping the resolution down a few notches but whatever I do, it’s always only showing 60.
or use a usb3 extension and have both hid and usb3 ports at the far end? usb3 extensions pretty cheap. You can use a cheap macroboard usually for remote switching like t he falcon rgb8.
the kvm isnt smart enough to do this; theres no smarts in it. it must be falling back to a lower dp mode because of snr loss. could try ddu to reinstall the driver in case the driver is “remembering” it had trouble handshaking with the display.
Remember the signal corridor with the kvm is one long signal corridor so all the keystones plus both cables on on both sides of the kvm may simply be too much loss for the notoriously buggy firmware alienware monitor to tolerate.
So I went to try it again, plugged my keyboard on an HID port again and my mouse stopped working. Couldn’t get it back even fiddling with the cables so I unplugged / replugged the KVM, and everything got fixed.
I can now use the keyboard on the HID port and use the hotkeys to switch, which is great. And I can also bring my refresh rate all the way up to 144 Hz. I even see 175 in the dropdown but last time I tried to use it (without the KVM) it wasn’t playing nice with HDR, so I’ll stay away from that one anywyay.
It’s a bit weird since I definitely restarted the KVM a bunch of times earlier and it didn’t fix anything, but now it did and it’s working great, not sure what changed but I’ll take it.
Thanks for the help !
the hid ports are all grouped together internally so if you have one problem hid device it can cause problems like this where the kvm is spending all its time dealing with one usb device that’s spazzing out. So I’d say be mindful of what goes in a hid port and be aware one problem device on one hid port can wreck all hid ports. Generally this is not true of how the usb3 ports work so you can use those devices on usb3 no issue
That makes sense. The only device needed on a HID Port is the keyboard really, for hotkeys, is there any reason to plugin the mouse to one (appart from just having more ports) ?
if you have custom dpi and tracking/polling rate settings the hid cutover prevents the mouse from feeling like its tracking at a different rate between systems. Assuming it is a mouse that follows hid protocol. otherwise no