touchscreen convertible laptop supporting dual monitors

Sxotty

Legend
Ok sorry trying to find a ultrabook style like the dell xps 12 convertible that supports dual monitors. What is the most elegant solution to this? Basically it would be nice to have a portable laptop that has touchscreen, but also can be used as a workstation with docking, or if it has the ports just plug in. Any ideas? I am aiming for 2k so don't go too crazy on it. I did not want to trawl through a bunch of junk if youguys already had the answer at your fingertips.
 
I have been waiting for a good convertible that was powerful enough to use as a workstation with 1-2 display outputs. Thanks for posting this thread. The only thing that needs to develop are good external GPUs and such a device would meet my almost every computing need.
 
I was wondering about those USB graphics cards. Will they work for photoshop style stuff? I remember some USB stuff in the past was slow, but I guess it was USB2 maybe USB3 has enough bandwidth now.
 
how are you setting up the monitors clone or extended ?
if its extended you should be ok as long as you dont use hardware acceleration in photoshop leave all that to your cpu
and of course games are out of the question

edit: dx10 +11 support
http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-674.shtml

looks like this actually has a proper gpu in it check out the supported games list

another review (note this guy only had usb2 and 2gb ram)
http://pluggedin.drupalgardens.com/content/review-his-multi-view-sound

The next test consisted of playing video games. The adapter impressingly handled games such as league of legends, Eve Online, Left 4 Dead 2, and dragon saga almost as well as a dedicated mid-range video card. Adjusting the games video settings that worked best resulted in some smooth gameply and good video quality running at about 60 frames per-second, give or take.

this looks like the one to get if your serious about it
 
Thunderbolt is ideal, given it's actually external PCIe 4x. It's a displayport too so even without a peripheral it connects to one monitor already.
I don't know about commercial Thunderbolt GPUs but a solution where you plug a regular vid card in a box should be doable (was done before but with a proprietary laptop or much slower Express card.)

Well, there's a demo of working hardware and Lucidlogix is doing it. It allows a hugely better 3D performance than Intel HD 4000 too. (a radeon 6770 in a box)
http://blog.laptopmag.com/thunderbolt-graphics-technology-turns-your-ultrabook-into-a-gaming-rig

T-bolt is "high end" though, and price of cables is infuriating but that may fit in that large two-grand budget.
 
how are you setting up the monitors clone or extended ?
if its extended you should be ok as long as you dont use hardware acceleration in photoshop leave all that to your cpu
and of course games are out of the question

edit: dx10 +11 support
http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-674.shtml

looks like this actually has a proper gpu in it check out the supported games list

another review (note this guy only had usb2 and 2gb ram)
http://pluggedin.drupalgardens.com/content/review-his-multi-view-sound
this looks like the one to get if your serious about it

This thing doesn't seem to have a GPU, running those games would be a physical impossibilty anyway - where goes the heat? We can assume it uses the laptop's GPU and run some clever software hack to redirect the output. Some games might not work, else there wouldn't be a need for a list at all (except it's a good way to show off)
Still probably the best USB solution if they can do that sort of thing but there has to be some latency.
 
oh, this USB box is crazy cheap ($45), it's probably a fine option, while still getting an ultraboogabook with both t-bolt and touch screen if that exists, this way you have headroom for further desktopification. (which may come in another way, crazy fast SSD, future 10Gb ethernet etc.)
USB 3.0 can do a lot of things too but will somewhat bog you down with overhead so the t-bolt port is nice to CYA.
 
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Thanks for the input when the time comes I will come back to this thread. There are plenty that do one external monitor via display port Blaz, it is just rare to get two monitors. Small form factors tend to limit the number of ports available via physical size limitations.
 
Can't you daisychain DisplayPort monitors? As long as everything is DP 1.2?
 
Can't you daisychain DisplayPort monitors? As long as everything is DP 1.2?

That is what I was wondering too. I remembered something like that I thought and the device I was looking at had a display port output, but if it only does clone it would not matter since I was looking for extended desktop on 2 external monitors.
 
This feature seams to be vaporware for some reason, I forgot such a thing existed, there's some info there but it actually shows a mock up. What you would look for is called a "Multi Stream Transport hub" so it would really be about independant screens.

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2012/04/2...isplays-and-what-you-might-be-missing-out-on/

Also, Ivy Bridge supports three displays so in theory you'd be good to go.
But maybe only Radeon cards do actually support "MST".. And maybe it never worked at all.

oh, I've found "Matrox DualHead2Go DisplayPort Edition" as a solution if you want to spend a small fortune (no mention of DP 1.2, and "support thunderbolt on mac only, windows support coming soon").
It's more priced like expensive HDMI capture solutions than just a $30 splitter.
Maybe the "MST hub" was projected to be too expensive or the engineering failed and it was terminated because of projections of too few people buying it. Dunno if there are dirty secrets, maybe borked Radeon outputs but the feature is vaporware even though it looked straightforward.
 
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