I currently use a Mac M4 for work and I need a new laptop for personal use. At home, I have two 4K screens that I run at 120 Hz. I do game via Moonlight. So I don’t need much performance. This is what the big, noisy home server is for.
The Framework Support couldn’t tell me if the Ryzen 5 3400 could run two screens at 120 Hz if I connected each screen separately via USB-C. They kept it vague, saying it depends.
Has anyone had success with this?
They’re right it depends upon the configuration and the monitors and cables. There is enough bandwidth on each port to do it without display compression.
Ok, it works with the monitors and cables that do work with the m4. So there are cables that dont work with the Laptop 13 that do work with an M4?
Shouldn’t be.
Yes. That would work.
I have 2 Strix Point systems (one of them FW13) which I use to run 2x 4K120 in HDR + the notebook display itself.
The hardware is ready for that. All the ports can easily do this. With the right monitors / dock this can also be done through a single cable, like I have.
Biggest challenge for support is, that AMD basically does not give many guarantees what they can do in total, so they don’t want to commit to sth. that they are not guaranteed by AMD and that could be stuttery or whatever.
This is not about ports, this is about the total throughput of the GPU and memory. But its still easily enough.
4x 4k60 is guaranteed for example, as Intel has been doing this for years (and has since upgraded to 1x 8K60 + 1x 4K60 guaranteed at minimum). More detailed specs from AMD are basically not available publicly.
And 2x 4K120 for example is equal in terms of GPU and memory throughput and the ports can easily surpass that.
The modern iGPUs are also capable of way more than that, but at a certain point, even the multi-page examples and far more detailed specs of Intel are not enough to know if its actually guaranteed, even with the slowest possible RAM with only one stick etc.
The bigger question would be, at what point (of bandwidth per display) you physically cannot run 4 displays at the same time anymore, because with Intel and Nvidia for example, parts need to work in pairs to achieve the very top of what is possible with one output (like 8K60, 4K240) so at a certain point it comes at the cost of active displays at the same time and the bandwidth is basically always enough to fully saturate what a single port can do for just a single monitor.