How many External Displays?

T0rchL1ght · December 16, 2021

Apologies if this has been covered to death, but my search has been in vain.

I'm trying to source a Laptop that can output to 4 external displays. The use case is more productivity/presentation than gaming, so 4 x 1080p 60 is fine.

Based on what I've been able to find, Thunderbolt 3/4 gets up to 2, but even if you have 2 TB4 ports, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have full PCIE bandwith for each port right? so its not like you can do 2 displays on each port. For example, Would one be able to connect and daisy chain up 4 external displays to an XPS 15?

The other factor is of course the GPU. Sources seem to say that a 3060 can do 4 displays, but that's on a desktop card with HDMI, DPx3.... so are the accessed through the TB4 ports on a Laptop version of the card?

Thanks in advance.

Bombastinator · December 16, 2021

2 hours ago, T0rchL1ght said:

Apologies if this has been covered to death, but my search has been in vain.

I'm trying to source a Laptop that can output to 4 external displays. The use case is more productivity/presentation than gaming, so 4 x 1080p 60 is fine.

Based on what I've been able to find, Thunderbolt 3/4 gets up to 2, but even if you have 2 TB4 ports, it doesn't necessarily mean that they have full PCIE bandwith for each port right? so its not like you can do 2 displays on each port. For example, Would one be able to connect and daisy chain up 4 external displays to an XPS 15?

The other factor is of course the GPU. Sources seem to say that a 3060 can do 4 displays, but that's on a desktop card with HDMI, DPx3.... so are the accessed through the TB4 ports on a Laptop version of the card?

Thanks in advance.

Some Macs have 2 thunderbolt ports, others have 4. Also one can use an external video card box to get more ports on any laptop that has 1tb port. The latency is supposed to be awful, but I’m not sure that will matter at all in this use case. My memory is you can generally do as many displays as a video card has ports regardless of the video card, so you wouldn’t even need a 3060. Any crappy desktop card would work if it had enough ports. 2d desktops just don’t take much processing. It’s the 3d stuff that costs.

Edited December 16, 2021 by Bombastinator