3 external DP monitors - a bridge too far?

[mtalinm]

My usual setup at work is a dock with two daisy-chained DP monitors. Just tried plugging in a third external DP monitor into the DP port. Shows up as "disabled" in the Screen Resolution tool; when I try to activate it the machine freezes (have tried multiple times).

At home I have only regular (i.e., non-daisy-chainable) monitors so I plug one into the dock and one into the DP port. works fine.

any ideas why this might be crashing? Maybe three external monitors is a bridge too far?

N

 

[Bandito]

As I recall, the SP3 will drive up to 3 monitors. Most of the time this would be two external monitors and the SP3's own display. To get it to drive 3 external monitors, you would need to disable the internal display first, I would think. I'm not sure how one would go about doing this, though.

 

[r0b123]

Very interesting. Can you close the screen while its docked? Maybe this will help drive 3 external DP monitors.

 

[agt499]

I had the same experience as the OP with 3 DP, however I have managed to get the SP3 display and 3 external working reliably : 2 daisychained DP directly off the SP3, a displaylink off the usb, and the sp3.
It won't work off the dock DisplayPort - as in other threads there is (something) less capable through the dock .
If you really wanted 3 external you could try as displaylink to something convertor?

 

[stanhertz]

There are some youtube videos showing people running 4 monitors and the sp display using a Pluggable usb 3.0 hub.

 

[GreyFox7]

There are some youtube videos showing people running 4 monitors and the sp display using a Pluggable usb 3.0 hub.

DisplayLink is a different technology and will require lower resolution on the displays. It might be suitable for your needs or not. I use a USB DisplayLink docking station and it works fine for my needs but may not be for everyone. Somehow DisplayLink masks the number of displays but it seems to be constrained to a max combined resolution, the more displays you configure the lower the resolution they can have.

The Integrated Intel graphics supports a max of 3 displays which is what is being enforced with DP connections.

Although I have not used 3 external monitors it would seem the third or perhaps second (one of them) must use the Project to a second screen option with the Second Screen Only choice which would leave the Internal display blank. Since I haven't done it you might have to experiment with the sequence a bit.

I saw a post on Redit about using a 3rd party script but not sure that's necessary or does anything different.