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Latitude 5400, WD19, dual P2418D QHD displays?
Hi,
I am setting up an office and I have bought a bunch P2418D 24" monitors and WD19 130W docks.
Many people have requested to have dual monitors, so I connected up my Dell Latitude 5400 to the dock with two P2418D QHD displays and basically it didn't work.
I played around with display settings but couldn't find a mode in which both monitors displayed nicely.
I could try to get the monitors exchanged for lower resolution monitors, but they do look great running at the native resolution (2560 x 1440).
If needs be I can buy new docks and keep the others in stock for as and when we need them in the office.
I just need to know what dock to buy?
Thanks,
Toby
jphughan
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March 2nd, 2020 07:00
I hope you can return either the displays, docks, or systems at this stage, because at least one of those components is going to have to change for you to get a working setup.
The Latitude 5400 only supports DisplayPort HBR2 from its USB-C port, not HBR3. As indicated on the WD19's manual available on support.dell.com, with an HBR2 system there's only enough display bandwidth available for dual displays up to 1920x1200, not dual QHD. If you ordered your 5400s with Thunderolt 3, which is optional on that system model, you could get the WD19TB dock instead, which can run dual QHD just fine (in fact it will run dual 4K 60 Hz) because Thunderbolt gives the dock access to 4x more video bandwidth than is available to the WD19 when using an HBR2 system. If you didn't order Thunderbolt 3 on your systems, you can either get 24" FHD/1080p displays that will work fine, or if you're set on QHD resolution, your only option would be something like the Dell D6000 dock, but that dock can handle its higher-end display setups because it uses DisplayLink, which introduces some drawbacks that can be significant in some use cases. I wrote about those in detail here if you're curious, specifically the post marked as the answer.
However, if you're set on 24" as a physical size, I'd strongly discourage QHD. To make most things readable on a 24" QHD display, you'll need to enable at least some display scaling in Windows rather than keeping the default 100%, and many applications still don't handle scaling particularly well. Even a 27" QHD display has a pixel density higher than the Windows "reference" 96 ppi standard (a 24" FHD display is slightly below that, incidentally), so 24" QHD could become rough to use even if it looks nice at first glance.