Issue:
Dell WD19 Dock – Limit to 2 Monitors, no Displaylink
Summary:
Older Dell E Series Docking stations always supported 3 monitors, however recently we ran into a couple of situations where the WD19 Dell Docking station wouldn’t properly support the third monitor – the third monitor ran at a much lower resolution. However using the laptop screen as a third screen worked.
Solution:
It has to do with the dock AND the graphics of the computer but more so the dock – specifically the WD19 won’t work with more than 2x displays at full resolution, it’ll show a third but it’ll be fuzzy or limited pixels or flickering, etc.
The Dell WD19 Dock doesn’t use Displaylink
This has to do with a few different things like if the laptop has “HBR2” or “HBR3” display bandwidth, I read that a lot of the newer precision laptops have HBR3 but older models and latitudes do not. And it’s kind of hard to find out if they do or not. The WD19 doesn’t use Displaylink (allowing more display bandwidth and ignoring built in limitations) or support thunderbolt so basically the only way to get it to display 3x monitors in full res was use two ports on the dock and one directly on the laptop.
So the WD19 is not a good one to buy moving forward. There are different versions like WD19TB that works with 3x displays if the laptop supports thunderbolt, or the universal dock which uses DisplayLink so won’t run into issues with getting it to display more than 2 monitors.
Links:
Dell Docking Station WD19 User Guide
Dell Docking Station WD19 Thunderbolt User Guide
Dell Universal Dock D6000 User Guide
Got further questions? Submit a question in the comment section below. Contact us for support.
–
If you require further help, please leave a comment and we will answer it as soon as possible.
For professional IT support, please contact ProTek IT Solutions.