Hi all, in my everlasting quest to reduce clutter on my desk i have recently purchased a x299 Deluxe II which eliminates a couple devices i needed externally before through onboard features and more pci. However, i still have a Caldigit TS 3 thunderbolt dock for my Work-laptop on the desk and was wondering, whether i can reduce wiring complexity by using the perks of thunderbolt. I am thinking of two options:
Using the onboard thunderbolt ports to turn the desktop into a dock (passing network, display, usb, etc through) when connecting the laptop to the desktop via thunderbolt and connecting all devices to the desktop, eliminating the dock.
connecting the dock to both the desktop and the laptop at the same time and connecting everything to the dock like:
a) charging port -> Laptop, Non-charging port->Desktop
b) Laptop -> desktop port 1, desktop port 2 -> Dock
Has anyone here done anything like this in software or knows enough about thunderbolt protocol to know how it will behave when plugging it in like this?
Edit: I am sorry if this is the wrong category for this kind of request, i haven’t posted here before.
Happy to be corrected but I can’t see either of those options working for you. To put it simply Thunderbolt has upstream and downstream, connecting two upstream devices to the dock just wouldn’t work and I don’t believe any TB enabled MB supports any features where by it becomes a downstream dock.
Provided your work laptop can join your local network can’t you just plug it in out of the way and remote desktop to it?
Hmh, where i got the idea is the target display mode on thunderbolt 2 iMacs. If you connect it via thunderbolt to a macbook, you get the imacs speaker, display, webcam and network passed to your macbook. Does that mean apple implemented a custom dual-purpose thunderbolt branch?
I thought about remoting, but the delay is kinda annoying in 3d-applications. Also, i just want to see it be done!
I’d forgotten that was ever a thing I’m not sure exactly how Apple implemented it, I know they stopped offering it as a feature a while ago though.
I’ve had a look around on the web, I can’t find anything about any companies offering support for what you want. I guess the best thing would be to have a monitor that supports a TB input and offers KVM functionality E.g. https://youtu.be/p6zkCoxSu70
I guess you could just try plugging both devices into your dock, but unless it’s designed to function as a KVM I don’t think it will work. It looks like Thunderbolt KVM’s are out there but not as common as USB 3.1 KVM’s from what I can see (Some L1Techs KVM’s still available in the store).