Daisy chained monitors with compatible laptop dock

Question

Quick background: Me and my wife both work from home sometimes, and are both used to two or three monitor setups while in the office. For our home office I would like to have a universal laptop dock (our work machines are from different manufacturers) connected to three monitors. Ideally these would be MST compatible so I can daisy-chain them together, not only does this limit cable messiness but also means if we get a home computer in the near future then it will be much easier to switch the video output between laptop and tower.

I am currently looking at this monitor option and this laptop dock, however I'm not sure if this will accomplish what I need. If not, what other options should I be considering?

Answer 1

According to the featured products page on the DisplayLink website there is only one product with 3 or more video outputs at the moment, the Dell D6000.

The Kensington SD3650 is based on an older chip only supporting DisplayPort v1.1. I think I have a very similar device based on this chip and it doesn't work with MST. My Dell U2515H is also a bit unreliable with MST but your mileage may vary with newer products. At worst you'd have to go back to connecting 3 displays to the dock separately, 2 through DP and one through HDMI. It may be a wiser choice to plan for that and capability to output at least WQHD.

I can't find details in the manual about MST support or the supported DP profile level, but it should work.

Since you're not going for monitors that use USB Type-C or Thunderbolt 3 for video, USB and power you will still have a few cables at the desk and some of the better DP cables are quite thick. Sorry but I don't think you can get a reliable solution on the market today. I'd love to see it too, and also compatible and affordable KVM switches.

Final note: if you are using f.lux/redshift you may want to check. I think I saw a comment by the f.lux developers that they got it working with DisplayLink chips after years of having no support, but I haven't checked since.