PC Master Race

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Switching monitors between two machines (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/pcmasterrace

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Hello! I'm in a situation, where I have a work laptop and a personal computer, the latter is used mostly for gaming. In order to switch between them I have to plug all the peripherals from one machine to the other, to help with that I bought a dock, to which I can connect everything, and connect the dock via one USB-C cable. The trouble begins with the monitors, as my laptop supports thunderbolt, but my motherboard doesn't, so it's a bit of a chore to switch them.

To alleviate the issue I'm considering changing my motherboard to one that has thunderbolt 4 support, as I have one 4K monitor and one full HD, and I've read it should support them fine on one cable. Is this a good solution? I'm thinking I might run into some issues with monitors not being connected directly to my GPU, latency or otherwise.

I beseech thee for help o masters of the PC.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You could look at KVM switches which allow you to switch input with the touch of a button, although they could be pricey.

Second idea that comes to mind is installing something like parsec on your laptop and just remoting into it from your desktop.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Remoting is certainly something I haven't thought of, latency shouldn't be a problem, only I'd need both machines to be on. Thanks for suggesting, it would save some money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I literally just rdp into my work laptop daily. Everything works, even Teams video calls.