Interesting! Well, I'm not intending to play games on both monitors, just one of them. The second monitor would have nothing changing on it, unless I chose to put up a chat window or an email checker there or something. Do you think it would help the frame rate if the second monitor didn't have any image changes?



The attached monitors are displaying data compressed images? Sigh.

Also, when I'm using this thing for audio tracking, I'm concerned about its fan noise, so anything taxing the CPU (like data compressing a video screen image) will probably increase CPU usage enough to make this thing's fan kick in. Sigh.

Thanks for the expert explanation of the way the dock functions. This is quite fascinating. Looks like I'll be using the dock for the secondary screen, and using direct-connected HDMI cable for the primary screen. I'm up to three plugs' worth of docking now (power, USB3, and HDMI), but luckily those are all grouped together on the same side of the laptop, the side facing away from me where it'll be sitting on my desk. So that's a plus.

Hm. Now that I'm committed to using the HDMI plug, I wonder if there's any way to make that HDMI cable connect into a dual-DVI setup, and I can skip the dock completely and just us a big USB3 hub instead. I wonder if a single HDMI cable has the capability to carry dual monitor information if the video driver supports it? I'll look that up. (*edit:* Nope)