I have to use this laptop for a while which only has usb 2.0 ports which are making my secondary monitors through the plugable usb 3.0 to hdmi (not the 4k one) adapters rather laggy. It is this one: http://plugable.com/products/usb3-hdm…
I guess usb 2.0 is too slow to have smooth full hd video output. I did however note that this laptop has an expresscard slot which you can add a usb 3.0 card to but that would only operate on 2.5Gbit instead of the 5Gbit usb 3.0 normally can. Will this be enough for my plugable video adapter?. Also, from what i’ve read, some of these expresscard slots are only connected through usb 2.0 internally in the laptop while others are connected through pcie. How do I find out if my expresscard slot on my laptop is a pcie based one? i couldn’t find it in any documents about my laptop, maybe some software can read it out?
We generally recommend against adding a USB 3.0 express card given all the potential configuration variables you mention. Also, most express cards including the one you linked to use first generation USB 3.0 chipsets which can be problematic with high-throughput devices like USB graphics adapters.
Aside from the factors above, the CPU and graphics processor of the system could be a bottleneck for HD playback using USB graphics.
So for HD playback on system like this, using a display attached to the onboard HDMI or VGA port will likely produce the best results.
hmm fair enough. Don’t think i’m not already using the video outputs of my graphics card, which are a vga and a hdmi but sadly won’t work at the same time to drive 2 monitors. i guess i’ll have to accept the laggy video output over usb 2.0 for now since you say that the usb 3.0 expresscard won’t work.
Although it was adviced by Gary Z that this expresscard adapter probably won’t work with the plugable graphics adapter, I still decided to purchase it as it’s nice to have usb 3.0 on this older laptop for various other stuff as well and its a cheap device anyway. To my surprise it does work pretty well on windows 10 (haven’t tested any other OS). As said by Gary, the laptop is indeed a bit underpowered but the displays are a lot more responsive now that the 2 adapters are on a usb 3.0 port on the expresscard although it is not a totally smooth experience either but good enough for most things and still a lot better than the usb 2.0 video output. I’m really pushing the capabilities of this machine with three monitors connected and there is a bit of stutter when moving windows accross monitors but that might be the low end cpu or the intel graphics being unable to keep up as well. Maybe this post can be added to the previous topic to keep the information in one place?