5120x1440 120hz from a laptop?

M3L · September 8, 2020

Hey,

I'm looking into buying a 120hz 5120x1440 monitor (Samsung c49rg94ssu) and pairing it with a high end laptop.

The goal here is professional work, not gaming - I know laptop gaming at these specs is not a thing.

It would be ideal to have a single-cable solution with PD, so some kind of Thunderbolt docking hub would be awesome.

As far as I understand, to push this I will need a whole DP1.4 HBR3 link (so 4 HBR3 lanes) coming from the source (laptop's GPU) all the way up to the monitor.

I believe that any dock that claims 8k30hz output should work (this requires 4x HBR3 lanes on the same DisplayPort output on the dock).

But then, I have no idea how to determine whether a laptop will output that signal over thunderbolt or not. There's a matter of

- the thunderbolt controller used in the laptop (whether it supports HBR3 or not == Titan Ridge controllers)

- where it receives its displayport signal from (integrated GPU or dedicated GPU)

- whether that can be somehow changed (e.g. in BIOS settings)

- if not and source is igpu, whether the igpu supports HBR3 (Ice lake seems to do, but there are no high performance chips for laptops yet)

most of which is not something one finds in manuals or documentation.

I'm mostly looking at Dell XPS 15 9500 series and Razer Blade laptops - if anyone has any experience or advice, please let me know. The hardware is too expensive for trial and error :)