Hi there. I know about KVM’s like the nice one offered here at Level1 - but I have a really wonderful docking stations for my work laptop - you know, looks like a brick and has 3 monitor outputs and ONE usb-c input from the laptop.
My motherboard has usb-c on my main rig (TRX40 AORUS XTREME) - so shouldn’t there be a way to to funnel all the peripheral outputs to the usbc with a software solution ? Or a ‘reverse docking station’ to take all my peripherals and funnel to usbc by hardware so that I can then have one dell D6000 connected to all peripherals and just swap the usbc when I am tortured to use my laptop because I need something that requires me to be on my work domain.
If I understood your question correctly you want to be able to ditch the docking station from your laptop and still being able to access it comfortably on your desk without using a KVM, right?
There are a lot of software KVMs on the internet, free and paid. Some even allow for file sharing from one PC to another. I don’t know how really good it is but some tech youtubers were sponsoring Synergy.
A quick look on Google for “sofware KVM” brings a lot of results.
But, not using an hardware KVM doesen’t allow you to share pen drives or printers, for example.
What you can’t do is connect your laptop directly with a USB C to your desktop to dock it to it and have the peripherals used by your desktop shared with your laptop.
You have to watch out for what protocol is actually being used here. USB-C is just a connector standard and actually says nothing about what is carried over it.
Many laptop docking stations that use a USB-C cable are running Thunderbolt over it. All of the good ones, anyway.
Your desktop might have Thunderbolt but it isn’t likely. You may be able to get an expander card that will do it, plus you’d probably need to figure out a way to run a DisplayPort cable around from your GPU to the TB card. I think some of the TB cards come with a nice short loop-around external DP cable.
Anyway, if the docking station is just a USB hub and not Thunderbolt, then it would work fine with a desktop.
And if it was TB and your desktop had TB then it would also work fine. It’s just that TB is uncommon on desktops.
Edit: It looks like one version of the Gigabyte TRX40 comes with Thunderbolt included. But if yours doesn’t, check these out:
I see their compatibility list includes some X570 boards but not the TRX40 boards, so you may need to double-check somehow that it will work if you wanted to get one.
Thanks zlynx - I think you’re on to something. My docking stations is a WD19 which is apparently not thunderbolt as that is a different model, the WD19TB. I found a video of Wendell looking at the TRX40 Designare from gigabyte that DOES have thunderbolt - and of course my Aorus Xtreme is - I don’t know. It doesn’t come with the add on card and makes no mention of compabibility.
For now - I am switching inputs on my monitors and switching my cordless keyboard and mouse are pretty easy. I would love to have the web came swap and make it all easy but I will be looking into this more before I get a different docking station and the add on card.