Can D3100 docking station connect x2 monitors to XPS 13 via HDMI?

Please see these two threads:

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/4613/t/19631116

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/os-applications/f/4613/p/19657787/20840994#20840994

Thanks cloojure, I appreciate you pointing out those threads.

Reading through them I can see you were using a 2014 Dell XPS 13 connected to the D3100 dock via USB 3.0. To the D3100 you had one monitor connected, and you had a second monitor connected directly to the XPS via the Mini DisplayPort. And things worked fine, although you pointed out that the CPU had to carry the load of the second monitor at around 12-25% of total CPU available.

Can I also ask if you had Ethernet connected to the D3100 as well?

And it's sound like you didn't, but I'll just ask, did you ever experience any lag, screen flickering or cut outs at all once you had things all set up after the 04 Nov 2015? Or any loud fan noise when pushing the D3100 connected display at all?

Thanks in advance for any additional details you can give.

Alan

Hi - The XPS 13 (2014 model 9333) has only wireless network support (no wired network port), so that is how I got online.  The D3100 was used only for 1 external monitor (and another on the build-in mini-DP port) as well as some USB stuff (mouse/keyboard/cell phone).

I have recently become a big fan of three 27" monitors (maybe 4 soon!) for my primary (desktop) computer (also Ubuntu 15.10 with a EVGA/NVidia card & Ubuntu-supplied drivers).  As the other posts stated, the D3100 can handle up to 3 monitors (I did experiment with this briefly), but having 2 or more monitors being driven by the CPU via the D3100/USB port causes the total CPU to peg between 50%-100% total (meaning all 4 cores are mostly saturated), which causes the fan to make a lot of noise (annoying!) and responsiveness to keyboard/mouse is reduced noticeably. 

With only 1 monitor on the D3100 (2 external monitors total) the fan never comes on and responsiveness is perfect.

Once everything was set up in Nov 2015 with Ubuntu 15.10, etc, everything has been perfect, except that I have *only* two monitors with this system.  ;)    Using 15.10 made all mouse pointer flickering stop.

Alan

Hi Alan,

Thanks for taking the time to give such a full answer. I really appreciate it.

Having since looked into this some more myself, I understand that using a USB 3.0 powered dock to drive two or more displays is always going to impact on the laptop CPU to a lesser or greater extent.

From your experience the XPS 13 (2014 model) couldn't reasonably handle two monitors via the dock. But I've since found out that a number of work colleagues have been running XPS 13 (2015 models) using the Targus ACP71EU dock, with two monitors and Ethernet going through the dock. The results haven't been perfect: some complained of some mouse and window lag, although all were still able to use them as their main workstations, so it wasn't crippling. And one is running Ubuntu on his XPS and said he's had no problems at all, although it's a secondary machine for him, and so not used as much.

I think the upshot is that the as the generations increase, and the CPUs get more powerful, the impact of multiple monitors over USB 3.0 is going to be become less and less of an issue. Certainly a new XPS now, in 2016, is going to handle things best of all.

For myself, I'm actually now leaning more towards the Precision 15 5510, which should fair even better.

Thanks again.

Alan