Level1Techs KVM - your experience? & latency

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I am considering buying a Level1Techs KVM because it looks cool and could make for a clean and satisfying desk setup.

There is not a huge amount of user experience posted online, and it is a somewhat expensive purchase.

So I thought I might ask 3 questions:

  1. What is your setup + how do you use your KVM?

  2. Are there any technical caveats to keep in mind? Or issues that you have found?

  3. What is the latency for display and keyboard/mouse input? (technical question for people who don’t want it to drag on gaming latency)

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Color me highly satisfied with the L1T DisplayPort KVMs.

  • 1a) I use two L1T 4-port KVMs to switch two monitors independently. Each KVM has a keyboard & mouse attached.

  • 1b) Eh? Not sure I understand the question. I use it to switch keyboard, video, & mouse between several PCs running Windows & Linux. Oh, and the monitors are 1440p at up to 120 Hz. See below re slight issue at 144 Hz, which may or may not be the KVM’s fault.

  1. The KVM has worked just fine for me. Minor exceptions:

  • Possible slight issue at 144 Hz refresh rate. I ran at 144 Hz for months almost fine, but with infrequent (circa once a day) screen blanking for 0.5 - 1 second. Finally realized this went away at 120 Hz; I haven’t investigated whether this is more due to cables or the KVM.

  • Perhaps 1% - 3% of the time, the display stays black after switching, as if the connection to the computer was not re-established. Switching away & back clears this up.

Even when a KVM works perfectly, it makes it easier to have an awkward or invalid configuration, such as:

  • Not having a monitor connected during boot, or switching the monitor away while using the UEFI. This generally requires resetting or power cycling the computer.

  • Inadvertently switching away from a monitor attached to a Windows computer, whereupon Windows “helpfully” rearranges the location of windows on the display(s).

  1. As a casual gamer, I have not noticed any hint of additional latency. However, I am not deeply interested and have not attempted to study or measure this.

There are some posts on these forums by people who have encountered issues, often with Macs or unusual setups. Many of these have been resolved. Sounds like you may have searched the forums; if not, you may want to do so.

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P.S. When I used the KVM also to switch audio, it was convenient to route the audio cables alongside the display cables. The result was a soft but noticeable buzz. Not terrible, but not quite ideal. Eventually I switched to a separate audio switch box & different cable routing.

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I also very satisfied with my KVM.

  1. I use KVM to swich 2 1080p monitors keyboard and mouse between my laptop and two PCs. One of them have nvidia gpu, another old AMD gpu (R7 360)

  2. My KVM have sometimes unexplainable behaviour:

  • AMD gpu sometimes think that both of my monitors are the same monitor (it think that my Samsung monitor is my Asus monitor), rebooting helps.
  • My AMD GPU fried 3 displayport cables (I think they were not very good to begin with, but where I live I couldn’t buy any good ones and international shipping does not work), but the same cables work great between KVM and monitors and KVM and NVIDIA gpu
  • Same as previous commentator:
  1. I usially don’t have time for gaming, and I don’t have anything to say about latency
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I wonder how one would test latency

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