Those are awfully low resolutions and refresh rates. And to deal with “displaylink” on top of that is not worth it to me. I would rather a dock that supports 2k@120hz at least on 3 monitors.
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These are the specs of my monitors, so it works out well for me. Have you found an option that can do 3 screens at 2k120hz?
While not a full dock, this did run all 3 of my 2k monitors at 120hz. But it had a fatal flaw in that every time i connected it to my laptop, I would have to disconnect and reconnect all three monitor cables to it in order for it to work.
I have my eye on this dock, but it’s by the same company and very expensive so I’m waiting on more reviews, and it doesn’t mention if it can push the same as the one I tried above. It also only has 100w PD so I would still need to connect my 180w framework power adapter.
At the moment I have had to settle on this one which gets me one 2k screen at 120hz and the other two at 60. This is passable for now, but I’m keeping an eye out for something better.
This thing looks like it should work.
Expensive also, but has a built-in nvme slot. Buy an adapter and you get 4 screens.
Without dsc, a dp1.4 mst hub can easily do 2x2k120 + 1x2k60, with dsc it could do a lot more than that but dsc mst hubs are really hard to find. Hope that gets better in the future as dp2.0 made dsc mandatory and mst heavily encuraged.
After reading reviews here I decided to play it safe (with support for Linux) and go for the Caldigit TS4 [1]. As the wiki entry at the top details, it all works really well with my 13" AMD FW with Fedora 39.
The audio, 2.5Gz Ethernet, PD charge work out of the box. The multiple USB A and USB C 3.2 ports are great. I got them chained up to further hubs and USB switches. All good. And of course the 2/3 Thunderbolt 4 and DP ports. I have not tested the SD card slots.
As for displays I have 3 screens (4k 144Hz, 4k 60Hz, 1080p 60Hz), and initially I tried passive HDMI adapters for the TB ports (as my desktop was hogging the DP ports). That did not work at all well. Then I got some active HDMI adapters [2]. They did work with my 4k screens. However not consistently well enough after restart/suspend etc.
So I decided to avoid the HDMI conversion and go native Displayport, and I ended up getting some DP KVM switches and 1 adapter [3][4] for my 4k screens. They work really well.
3 screens with 4k etc are really too much for even USB4 so I don’t use the 1080p screen via the hub. Instead, I plug that directly into the FW laptop when I occasionally need it.
Highly recommend the Caldigit TS4, especially if using Linux. It is not cheap though.
[1] Thunderbolt 4 Dock | TS4 | CalDigit – CalDigit
[2] Cable Matters Active HDMI adapter https://amzn.eu/d/0eqnAwLj
[3] Ugreen 8K DP KVM https://amzn.eu/d/07KlvbTf
[4] Cable Matters DP adapter Amazon.co.uk
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odds this will actually work?
https://www.amazon.com/DisplayPort-Monitor-LIONWEI-Docking-Station/dp/B0C73D4KNL
$100, appears to be 3 port MST USB4 with 96w charging. Other port selection is kind of limited. Plenty of favorable reviews from people who got it for free. The one person who paid for it gave it one star.
FW16: I use uGreen Revodok Pro 313 USB
Gigabit Ethernet Working
ALL USB Ports for data working
PD + HDMI + DP + etc still needs testing (i currently use the DP out of my eGPU)
I picked up the Lenovo Thunderbolt 4 dock 40B00135.
Running Xubuntu 22 - nothing works. It’s just broken.
Running Xubuntu 24 - Works great. Four screens. One big catch. If I unplug any of the monitors from the dock while it is on, the laptop hard locks. Have to hold the power button to shut it down. I had planned to use this with a displayport KVM, but if I switch to a different system, I get the same hard lock. I’m going to try one of those EDID emulators to keep the signal active.
Edit/update - With the laptop screen innactive, the lockup does not happen. I added a 4th screen to the dock and disabled the laptop screen, and how it works perfectly fine when I disconnect a monitor.
So I learnt 2 things: Max of 4 monitors including the built in screen, no matter how you hook them up (displaylink or other external gpu the exception). And the displayport directly attached to the 7700 does not count towards that total.
5 screens - 3 on the dock, laptop screen, and one on the dGPU.
Then also that for some reason if you unplug a displayport monitor attached to this dock when the laptop screen is active, the system hard crashes.
Every gpu has a limited number of displays (pretty sure it’s limited by something called a CRTC even if it has nothing to do with cathode rays anymore XD), it’s surprisingly hard to find the numbers sometimes. pre 7000 series highend amd cards used to have 6, not they got 4, higer end nvidia stuff is 4 with the exception of some workstation/server cards and intel used to be 3, now I think they are also at 4.
Just for an experiment I daisy changed the docking stations and I was able to get 6 screens going with two of them being silicon motion chips all over the one usb4 cable. The SM screens were laggy; I assume because the bandwidth left after 4 displayport screens were active. When trying to add a 7th screen xubuntu just logged me out. If I tried to login it dropped to a shell, some text sped by real quick, and then went back to the login screen. I assume I’m hitting an OS limit now.
@Foxtrek_64 the first post has reached the maximum size for a post. If I now try adding details to the table, I get an error “An error occurred: Body is limited to 32000 characters; you entered 32018.” (Hence I left incomplete the row for the great Tecnoware hub I just bought.)
I suspect we must either split the content in multiple posts, or move the table elsewhere (e.g. in a real wiki, or even better a searchable database).
Please let me know what you would like to do with the OG post, I’m ready to assist if we want to divide it or do something else with it.
Just adding (since the wiki is full) that the Anker 568 works pretty well under Linux (and it seems Windows). Full review: [User Review] Anker 568 + Framework 13 (AMD + Intel 12th gen)
I think it might be worth it to split this into a full Wiki. With cross linking devices that are compatible with all the boards for the FW13 and the FW16.
Compatibility with the usb-c/thunderbolt expansions can be a rabbit hole. If we can get a list that is fully sortable/searchable that would be amazing.
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The ideal approach is a searchable database of the kind of https://www.gsmarena.com , but possibly a much quicker and still pretty convenient way to organize information would be a Spreadsheet in Google Docs or similar.
The (editing) link to it would be shared at the top of this thread (unless a few people volunteer to keep it updated with information posted in the thread), and in order to run complex searches, one could copy/download the spreadsheet and (for instance) sort columns, or even use VLOOKUP (a couple of examples would be provided). Note that in order to make this convenient, the table should have one column per feature, e.g. “HDMI”, “PD”, “USB-C”, “Ethernet”… (plus one for additional “Notes”).
An alternative is to just move instructions and the table of non-working devices to the second post of this thread (@Foxtrek_64 would have to do it), but it would be less convenient, and only a temporary solution until we saturate the first post again.
Yeah, pretty much everything current (and not server etc.) is limited to 4 by now (also, Nvidia should have had 4 for a long while. If the GPU has few outputs, you may only achieve it with MST). Only Apple does its own thing, selling chips with considerably less and considerably more.
I grinded my teeth a lot finding numbers for AMD (summary thread, different forum), because they just have no good public specs on any of this. The previous 6 display limit was hardly documented and it had tons of constraints to actually achieve it. And it is not even documented with which generation this went away. Even now a lot of AMD fans will reference the ancient FAQ stating 6 displays, even though it has been proven that modern AMD iGPUs and dGPUs no longer work that way.
Seems everything is going the way of discrete, universal display pipelines, even for MST streams. Simply 1 for each screen. And possibly combining multiple of them for really high-bandwidth displays (reducing max. display count below 4). But this combining and limitations that apply to the sum of all displays are not well documented for any GPU.
That’s probably a bit market segmentation and a lot more that the crtcs are part of the gpu tiles so if you get more gpu cores you also incidentally get more crtcs.
The constraint was that you pretty much need an mst hub XD.
It is really hard to find info. Best information I found was a linux drm database and just count the crtcs.
I don’t think the igpus ever had 6, only the higher end desktop cards got the 6 crtcs.
Good source, thx. I found other info on AMDs features from Linux source code before, but not that one.
I never had a matching GPU to play around with it. But what AMD themselves wrote back then at least read a lot like they also had limits of TMDS output or maybe even non-MST output limits (i.e. to reach the full 6 some amount HAD to be TMDS and not every port would allow you to drive TMDS displays simultaneously). But we no longer need to care now that its gone.
Yes. Ever since they upgraded from 3 to 4 displays. Does not stop some people form claiming it though.
Could be. But since they only offer very few discrete variants and also reduce all IO and most outputs are also paired to TB ports, this might just be completely explicit (like the smallest chip for a long time fixing 1 pipeline to eDP/HDMI and 1 for both TB ports). Also we still do not know if Apple left out MST support in hardware. That would also simplify the design greatly as you might move all of it closer / into the TB ports since you do not to route multiple streams to a single output. I also never got clarity which combinations Apple supports when using 2 DP tunnels per TB port. Do some share there DP output? Or is every possible combination supported?
As a matter of fact, I still haven’t found that out for the AMD USB4 implementation. Can both USB4 ports each drive 2 DP connections. Or do they share 2 between themselves like Intel likes to do?
Back when dvi was still a thing both amd and nvidia had limits on how many of them you were able to use at the same time but displayport was allready fine. I do have semi fond memories of running eyefinity on my 7970. Slightly less fond ones of running nvidia surround on my 780s after that.
Nah that’s purely software, at least for the pre m1 era (mst worked on intel macbooks just fine as long as they didn’t run macos), now I am curious if someone has tried mst with asahi.
Pretty sure it’s one each, amd left out (or borked, I have seen reports of it being kinda there but not really working) the second dp channel which is only a thunderbolt thing, usb4 only requires one. The whole 2 channels in thunderbolt thing was kind of the solution to multiple displays on a cable before mst became a thing and mostly apple seems to just keep rolling with that instead of using mst.