I recently moved and cleared out a ton of ewaste. We are talking like 20 some desktops, numerous laptops, networking gear, test equipment, monitors. 6 months later, I’ve got the old house sold and am finally working on setting up a semi-permanent home office. I do FW/SW eng dev support .
Taking inventory of the gear I’ve retained and trying to figure out how to set it up. If I’m stuck in the dark ages of numerous 1080p monitors and need to get with the times. Workstations changed over time, but typically a combination of the hw and KVMs was used. If money needs to get spent on a better KVM and or consolidating the old monitors for something more recent, I’m open to it. How would you set this up?
First impression is to get a 3 or 4 head, 4 computer KVM. Unfortunately, this seems to be asking a lot and the wrong move. KVMs seem to support high resolution over quantity. Even at 1080p resolutions I don’t see many options. Perhaps get dual high resolution monitors and a modest 2monitor, 4computer KVMs? I don’t think I need the high performance of L1T KVMs. It seems like modern mobile gpu limit the quantity of displays more than the resolution.
I’ve been using display link for the better part of the last 10 years. This makes me wonder about usb3 switching and going that route… However, this sounds short sided. I’m thinking a 5 year solution here. The no money route would be to just set up the workstation and thinkpad doc on a KVM with the ultrawides and just remote desktop into some of these.
Then set up the gaming computer elsewhere with a kvm for misc tasks. Perhaps further consolidating the desktops and running dual os instances.
HW-
3 * Pairs 1080p 22”, 24”, 27” modest monitors
2 * 25” ultrawide 2560x1080
3 * pluggable display link docs/ external “graphics cards”.
2 * KVM IOgear GCS1642 Dual DVI, Dual Computer (not linkable, long story)
1 * KVM Star Tech SV231TDVIUA Triple DVI, Dual Computer
Personal Laptop -Thinkpad T440p laptop i7-4710MQ Intel 4600.
I’ll consider updating this when Alder Lake-P comes out, but it does the job.
ThinkPad Pro Dock - DP 1.2, HDMI, and DVI-D USB3
Work Laptop -recent Vostro Dell Intel tb3 and NVidia graphics
This has corpo restrictions and is unusable for most work but must be used for VPN, etc…
I typically just remote desktop into this.
Dell WD19TBS dock - HDMI, 2 x DP, Thunderbolt, USB-C
Home Workstation Ryzen 2700, RX460, older Quadro
“Stable” machine used for personal projects, cad, media storage, Transcoding, Video editing
Home Desktop Ryzen 1700 RX580
“Unstable” machine Used for general purpose consumption, casual gaming
Misc SFF c2d, nucs, nas, dev boxes, etc…