Displaying monitors through thunderbolt 3

[farmercoco]

Hi guys!

 

At work my boss runs an acer notebook, I'm not quite sure on the full spec but it's not exactly a powerhouse! He wants to run 2 displays off of it but only has 1 HDMI output. I suggested getting a thunderbolt dock and running 2 displays off of that. My first question is would it have a massive effect on performance? (laptop is only really used for excel and such) would it also be able to extend them as 2 seperate displays or would it just mirror them?

 

Any responses I get are really appreciated and I hope this hasn't already been asked!

[Slottr]

I'm sure it will be fine. We've been pushing laptops out on docks for years now and they definitely didnt have the highest of end gpus 

[Kilrah]

You might want to make sure that machine actually does have TB3 and not just regular USB-C.

[19_blackie_73]

running a dell xps 15 from the dock, most of the time on igpu, works just fine. But yeah, as @Kilrah stated make sure it's really tb3 and not usb gen x.x. Especially for excel and such stuff, you won't notice a difference. in the standard config, my xps wants to run the 3 displays simultaneously, but you can disable the internal display in windows display settings.

[farmercoco]

Thanks for the speedy replies guys! I looked the other day and it is running thunderbolt 3 so hopefully it should work fairly well!

[19_blackie_73]

2 hours ago, farmercoco said:

 

Just make sure the dock you are getting supports 2 monitors at your desired resolution, most of them have some sort of caps what works and what won't work with hgher resolutions than 1080p

 

Oh and make sure to quote people