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May 30th, 2020 11:00

4k Laptop to QHD 1440p

Hello Everyone,

I am planning  on extending my working capabilities and I am interested to buy 32" Curved QHD monitor with 165hz.

Question: Will my 4K UHD 15" laptop with 7th gen i7 8550U with Intel UHD 620 and NVIDIA GeForce MX150 GPUs work without issues with resolutions or any other issues? 

Has anyone done 4K laptop to QHD monitor extension?

At the moment my laptop is at 250% recommended scale with 3840x2160. 

Thanks in advance.

9 Legend

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14K Posts

May 30th, 2020 16:00

@Cyber Sec.  As a general bit of advice, when asking about technical questions like this, it's often a good idea to identify the specific models of items involved in your plans, such as the display and actual system, not just quoting specs.  That might allow someone who's familiar with those items to call out any potential issues or limitations that might exist with those particular items (or using them together) and that might not be obvious.

I'm also assuming that your curved 34" QHD display would not be an actual QHD display (2560x1440) but actually ultrawide QHD (3440x1440).  But either way, I personally wouldn't recommend trying to use a 15" UHD and a 34" QHD display simultaneously.  You'll probably want to run your 34" QHD display at the default 100% scaling, and if you're running your built-in display at 250% scaling, that's going to create a huge GPU scaling gap to bridge.

Windows does allow you to set different scale factors for different displays, but it will only ever render everything at a single scale factor, and it uses the scale factor of whatever display was primary at the time you log in.  For any other scale factors that come into play on other displays, Windows will still render everything at that one scale factor and then blow up or shrink down the rendered content to fit the scale factor being used on the non-primary display where the content is being displayed.  As you might imagine, that mechanism doesn't look as nice as rendering for the scale factor actually being used on that non-primary display in the first place.  This is especially noticeable for text, which is designed as "vector graphics", which basically means it can be scaled up or down basically infinitely with no loss of sharpness as long as you do it pre-rendering -- but if you render the text to turn it into a pixel-based image and THEN scale it up or down, it won't look as good.  That's why you might see threads on this forum saying something like, "I've noticed that whenever I have my external display and built-in display in use at the same time, text doesn't look as sharp on one of them, even though if I only use one or the other at a time, they both look fine."  They're seeing the effect I just described.  Windows will deal with multiple simultaneous display scale factors, but it can't optimize for more than one simultaneously.

This is why I recommend that people only use displays that can share a single scale factor simultaneously, or at least very close scale factors.  But mixing 100% and 250% means that whenever you're using them together, one of those displays isn't going to look anywhere near as good as it would on its own.

So if you want to extend your workspace, consider buying one or two external displays that would by themselves give you the workspace size you want so that you don't have to use the built-in display simultaneously.  That's actually a far more ergonomic setup anyway if you wouldn't be keeping your laptop on a stand.  If you like the idea of a single large display rather than separate displays, there's the Dell U4919DW that's 5120x1440, i.e. two QHD displays fused together.  Or just get a pair of regular QHD displays, which will be significantly less than buying a single display of that combined size/resolution.  Those displays are great if you're doing work in an application that would singlehandedly use all of that space, in which case eliminating bezels is nice, but if you'll simply have a lot of different applications open, then having physically separate displays can be convenient for compartmentalizing, plus it gives you a bit more physical placement flexibility and again, a lower cost.

9 Legend

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14K Posts

May 30th, 2020 16:00

@Cyber Sec.  One potential workaround here would be to run your 15" UHD display at 1920x1080 whenever you had your external display attached.  In that setup, both displays would be usable at 100% scaling, and although running an LCD below its native resolution generally introduces blurriness, dropping specifically from UHD to 1080p doesn't create that problem because 1080p is precisely 1/4 of UHD, which means each pixel of a rendered 1080p image will map precisely onto a 2x2 physical pixel grid on your UHD display.

But depending on how often you'd be connecting and disconnect from that display, it might get a bit old to keep changing the resolution and scaling settings of your built-in display based on whether the external display was attached.  And if you start your Windows user session while your built-in display is set to UHD and 250% scaling, then after connecting the external display and reconfiguring the built-in display, you'll need to sign out and back in for Windows to start rendering internally at 100%.  Same goes for if you start your user session with your external display attached (and set as primary) and then later disconnect it and want to use your built-in display at UHD resolution -- you'll need to sign out and back in for Windows to make that switch internally.  If you're thinking that this dilemma creates a problem for business users who might have display combinations like this and might dock and undock multiple times per day, you'd be absolutely right.  They have to choose between either signing out and back in every time they switch, or else putting up with the fact that in one situation or the other, their display(s) won't look as good as they could.

May 30th, 2020 18:00

Hello @jphughan ,

First of all apologies for not being specific on models. 

I had tried to post links of monitor and laptop in here but it given me error when I tried to post the thread so had to remove it. I am new to this forums so still learning bit and bytes of it. 

I really appreciate your elaborated explanations and possible scenarios regards to how it may end up due to different resolutions and lots of scaling. 

Your post has thoroughly made my doubts clear about mix matching 2 different level of resolutions.

Monitor I was interested was on sale so was tempted to get it. Model is Dell 32" Curve gaming monitor S3220DGF. 

Monitor Model  

My laptop is HP Spectre 15.6" 2 in 1 4K UHD Touch Model: 15-BL112DX 

Laptop Model 

Mostly I have browser open with multiple tabs, least 2 VMs and I really like the idea of getting 2 same display and use them instead laptop rather doing laptop+QHD. Also getting 1 big monitor works but I think 2 different will have more options for me to use at will and future options as well. 

I am leaning more toward getting 2 displays of same resolutions. 

Thank you for your very informative advice and time writing it in details. 

 

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