I can't live without my four-way 4K monitor setup that I use for my home workstation. I really appreciate being able to put my chat window on one monitor, play a video on another, and still have two screens for regular work. In fact, I'd really like to up my game to six monitors, but there's a small problem. My graphics card, like pretty much every other recent graphics card on the market, has just four fibeo ports. If I want a fifth monitor, I'm going to need to add another GPU.
But graphics cards, even the low-end ones, don't come cheap and many motherboards don't have more than one slot that's long enough to accommodate a second GPU. Fortunately, Synaptics will soon have an inexpensive and space-saving solution: a sub-$100 single-slot PCIe x1 card based on its DisplayLink DL-7400 chip.
Known for powering USB docking stations with one to four monitor outputs, Synaptics' DisplayLink technology works by utilizing your computer's resources — which can be a combination of your CPU and GPU — to send video to monitors connected via USB.
This allows a laptop to connect to a DisplayLink dock over a single USB 3.0 port and output to several monitors — along with providing relevant USB ports, Ethernet, and a microSD card reader. Unlike other docking solutions that might use Thunderbolt or USB's alternative mode to output a DisplayPort or HDMI signal, DisplayLink is GPU agnostic. It only needs you to have a USB port and it can even work relatively well on an old computer.
