USB Monitor

[TheMawn]

I thought I would share this neat little gem with everyone here.

http://ca.aoc.com/monitor_displays/e1649fwu

I got one of these a while back which will undoubtedly serve me in more ways that one over its life. It is a monitor powered and connected by USB. It is very lightweight and can be stood in portrait or landscape at a very nice viewing angle. I installed the included software with very few problems. It is very specific about wanting you to install the software before connecting it for the first time. The installation is a bit annoying because there are no success messages so you just have to trust that the installation was successful.

After connecting for the first time, it took a few seconds to exchange information with the USB slot it was plugged into (plug your USB stick into a different slot for the first time and notice that the drivers have to install again) but since then, it takes less than a second for it to power on and display when plugging it back in.


The display is driven entirely by USB so it does not (and cannot) interact with your GPU in any way. If a GPU-less system could be "fooled" into booting to the OS, you wouldn't even need it. I'm using it to monitor my new X99 system now and the GTX 660 Ti is doing TF at 293.5 GHz-days per day because the display isn't taking away computing resources

I think it's meant to serve as a lightweight secondary monitor for something like a presentation but it is so lightweight that it could be very easily used for monitoring multiple systems that don't have their own displays. Have a mouse/keyboard combo in one hand, the display in the other and go from system to system in as long as it takes to plug in a couple of USB cables.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by TheMawn

I thought I would share this neat little gem with everyone here.

http://ca.aoc.com/monitor_displays/e1649fwu

It certainly looks nice. Any idea on whether Linux drivers are available? Desultory searching suggests not.

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by xilman

It certainly looks nice. Any idea on whether Linux drivers are available? Desultory searching suggests not.

Requires kernel version 3.9 or higher. May also depend on a minimum X version. I don't know.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Mark Rose

Requires kernel version 3.9 or higher. May also depend on a minimum X version. I don't know.

Thanks. Definitely more interesting now for a particular application I have in mind. One of my Parallellas is losing its ethernet connection. As it's headless and on a common power supply with the rest of the cluster debugging is turning out to be a real PITA.