Thinkpads Forum

I currently have a T61 with an Advanced Dock. I have 2 19inch monitors connected to the pass through ports (1xDVI, 1xVGA). I'd like another monitor, and have been looking at the samsung syncmaster 940UX with USB connection, but is anyone using the PCI-E to drive multiple monitors? If I add a PCI-E card would I loose the build in DVI/VGA connections, or could I run both in parrellel to drive 3 monitors? If it's either/or, is anyone doing this and can recommend a PCI-E that could drive 3 monitors, (either VGA or DVI).

I don't do gaming so I'm not looking for a really high performance card! The Samsung 940UX costs about £180, so I'd be looking for a monitor + graphics card for less than that if it's going to be a viable option.

I would much prefer a PCI-E solution over a USB solution when it comes to video. Especially since you already have the dock.

You can connect up to two monitors per video device, so you can connect two to the built-in device of the laptop, and two more to the external PCI-E card. Yes, you can use both devices at the same time.

If you do a search for this here, then I'm sure you'll find plenty of posts addressing this issue in addition to my opinion below.

I've used successfully both a T60p and a T61p with the Advanced Dock and a couple of graphics cards:

• - ATI RADEON X1300 XT 256MB PCIe graphics card, and
  - Geforce 7600GT 256 MB PCI-E Graphics Card.

Always with Windows XP (as far as I know this setup does not work with Vista, but I may be mistaken as I've never used Vista).
Altogether I could use 4 displays: T60p/T61p internal LCD, external WUXGA LCD, 2x UXGA CRTs). If you don't want to use the Thinkpads internal LCD, then you can use a fourth external monitor instead.

Not all PCIe graphic cards will work in the dock with all T6x. Again, do a search and you'll get suggestions for the ones that do work (among other things, size and power consumption is a limiting factor).

I no longer use more than 2 monitors simultaneously as it did not increase my productivity and using a graphics card in the dock comes at some inconvenience:

• 1. You lose the option of warm/hot docking the Thinkpad -> you have to boot the Thinkpad docked and need to shut it down before undocking; otherwise you will encounter a blue screen shortly after docking/undocking (this is an XP restriction as the graphics card is not plug and play).
  2. The fan in the docking station for the PCIe slot gets annoying over time (I usually don't mind some noise but I could not stand it for a whole business day).

In the end, these cons outweighed the pros of using more than two monitors.

Thanks for the replies.

Sounds like the disadvantages outway the advantages. I don't want to loose the hot docking option, and the dock is already noisy enough without an additional fan in it!

I too decided against the advanced dock + pci-e card. It seemed that most of the guys reporting success were using T60/p with the ATI chips along side an "certain" ATI pci-e cards and not the nVidia chips in the T61/p (with a corresponding nVidia pci-e card). And like you mention, the added cost (advanced dock + the cards), space, and fan noise. I'm running Windows Vista Business x64 SP1, so I have to use the same driver to get the multiple displays to work. You have much more flexibility with a T60 or T60p and an ATI card.