Hello,
I built a PC with a 5600g APU recently only to realize that I was dependent on a dual screen setup ever since corona hit and going back to single screen felt awful. (the motherboard has a single HDMI display out)
Currently I solved this with a 9600 gt I had from my old PC, but it seems to blue screen on occasion. So I started looking into a thunderbolt add in card since my motherboard has a single thunderbolt 5-pin header.
(and I refuse to buy a 710 card, i wont have a use for it once I upgrade to a dGPU so it feels like a massive waste in comparison to what is possible with a thunderbolt)
I want to be able to have 2 display outputs for the 2 displays i already have.
What do I need to consider when choosing the thunderbolt card? And are there caveats in thunderbolt that prevent me from using the card as a display adapter?
according to the gigabytes website, these 2 cards are supported by my motherboard:
GC-TITAN RIDGE (rev. 2.0)
GC-TITAN RIDGE (rev. 1.0)
Also if there are resources I can use to learn more about the technology and its capabilities/shortcomings it would be much appreciated if you could share those with me.
Thunderbolt isn’t a display adapter. It’s a pipe through which you can tunnel the display output from your display adapter.
See the 2 display port INPUTs on the Thunderbolt card,
you can plug your display adapter display port ouputs into those, then output those display port channels later in the Thunderbolt chain, e.g.:
Note the part that says, “A graphic card with DisplayPort support [not pictured] is required”.
Or you can, much more simply and inexpensively, just connect your display adapter output directly to your monitors. Either way, however, you need a display adapter.
My motherboard supports a single HDMI output. which I thought i could convert to 2 different monitor outputs using this since thunderbolt seems capable of that.
An extremely simple solution is to buy a GT 710 and use its display outs instead, but I want to avoid that solution if possible.
Is a USB-A display adapter a good alternative? i cant seem to find any for a relatively low price and clear support for what i want. the USB-c types require DP Alt-mode to be supported which my motherboard doesn’t.
Ideally I could use an HDMI splitter to get 2 different screens on 1 port but that doesn’t seem possible or if it is I haven’t found a method to do that.
My motherboard does have HDMI 2.1 but i haven’t found a way to utilize that for dual displays.
The simplest solution is to get a GPU. USB-A adapters have been hit or miss from what I can tell. Sometimes they work fine other times they don’t. Really depends on the monitor resolutions and the quality of the card. Thunderbolt on AMD systems can have issues as the onboard APU’s might not pass video over correctly especially if the Motherboard vendor didn’t set it up properly on a hardware or firmware level.
I would recommend getting a quadro p1000 or a GT 1030 over a 710 as they are no longer receiving driver support from NVIDIA(as of 8/31).
There’s no magic that makes one into two. (The closest is Display Port MST, which can make one into two halves, or one into multiple fractions adding up to one.)
Thunderbolt does not make two display outputs. It just tunnels up to two display outputs. If you put two display outputs into one end, you can extract two display output out another end. If you only pipe one in, you only get one out. If you pipe nothing in, you get nothing out.
The matrix of DisplayLink USB-to-Video chipsets, and their capabilities is here. And, here’s a product that uses the best DisplayLink offering: the Plugable USB3-6950-DP. The vendor recommendation says:
" IMPORTANT NOTES —Doesn’t support content requiring HDCP (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Video, iTunes, HBO Go, etc.) Not recommended for gaming, or software requiring a dedicated graphics card."
I have however known accountants who used DisplayLink USB to video adapter setups who were pretty happy with the extra screen real estate to view their spreadsheets. If you likewise just view 2D stuff, numbers/text/etc., you might also be satisfied.
What motherboard do you have with AGPU support with only a single video output? Maybe for the same price as other options, you can replace it with something that taps into multiple display outputs, if the AGPU is capable of it. Something like the ASUS Prime B550-PLUS, which looks like it has two displays out (HDMI & DP), maybe?
I’ve been working on dual 34" 4K 2K (3440x1440) monitors for a while. I’m getting to the point when I don’t think having my focus point always to one side or the other is optimal. I also think that a total 68" wide of viewing space is just too far a distance to keep things in view.
I thinking of changing to a single 34" 5K 2K (5120 x 2160) monitor straight in front of me.
