Help connecting 6 monitors to laptop

[anj]

Hi there,

I am hoping to find a solution for an oddball use-case relating to a video art installation. The short version is that we are trying to find a way to support 6 monitor outputs with an MSI creator 15 laptop with 32GB ram, intel i7, which has USB C and A as well as HDMI.

More context, if needed: VLC media player has an option to split one video into multiple windows, and the resulting individual windows can be spread across multiple monitors. We’d like to split a video into 6 windows and then distribute these out to a pile of old CRT televisions (via a cheapo downscaler used on each TV to convert the digital signal to analogue), which creates a kind of mosaic effect. We’ve already made this work in the past with 3 old TVs using a StarTech hub and a mix of displayport/HDMI outputs, each being converted to RCA using cheap dongles to go into the TV. But that was pretty much just a proof of concept and I’d really need to support more like 4-6 TVs using this method or a similar one. As you may gather, quality is not a particular concern, as we’re dealing with lo-fi glitch content here. This setup would only be deployed occasionally, as for daily use we run 3 monitors and have no issues. Any advice would be welcome.

(Secondary question: wondering if the old Startech hub would “play nice” with a second docking station if they were both connected simultaneously. In other words, can I connect two that support 3 monitors to achieve the goal, if there’s no all-in-one solution.) Thanks in advance

[RichardA]

Thanks for reaching out to Plugable support! I’d be happy to help with your questions.

We do not offer a six monitor docking station. One way to achieve six monitors would be to make use of one of our USB 3.0 double display docks such as the UD-6950Z or UD-3900Z dock along with four of our USB 3.0 graphics adapters (UGA-3000) to drive a two other displays. I would recommend you take a look at their products pages for additional information.

There are a few important details to keep in mind:

1. Our UD-6950Z, UD-3900Z, and UGA-3000 adapter relies on a USB graphics technology known as DisplayLink. DisplayLink graphics is great for general office or productivity use, but we do not recommend DisplayLink for any graphics intensive tasks such as gaming.
2. Please note that the maximum number of display we support via DisplayLink is 6. With each additional display, more resources are required from the CPU and GPU of the computer, which can result in imperfect display performance depending on the graphics burden
3. The above recommendations are made assuming your six monitors are standard 1920x1080 monitors. If you are looking to do this setup with higher resolution (4K) screens, these solutions will not work.

If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

Richard A
Plugable Technologies
https://plugable.com/support