"IOGear 4 Port DVI KVMP Switch with Audio and Cables GCS1764" 7.7 out of 10. based on 289 ratings
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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent product, but you may run into this easily-solved problem...
By Steven Meuse
I have a Dell Dimension 4550, a QuickSilver 2002 PowerMac G4 and a PowerMac G5 Quad I needed to share a 23" 1920x1200 LCD DVI display. After reading the reviews here, I gave it a go, and I like the product a lot. I like that it comes with all the cables you need, whereas some of the more expensive units don't. I had to dig to find that out, and that it adds about $100 to their cost to buy four cable sets separately.
There was one major problem: when the Dell Dimension 4550 was turned on, the keyboard would lag badly or sometimes spit out 20 copies of the last character, regardless of which computer I was using. And when using the Dell, the optical wheel mouse would go dead every minute or two, requiring an unplug & replug (or switching to a Mac, then back to the Dell).
IOGear tech support was very helpful, and it turns out there's an issue with motherboards using nForce4 chipsets and their USB implementation. After a few back-and-forth emails with
quick turnaround, IOGear support pointed me to a discussion in an nVidia forum. A lot of people were having the exact same symptoms as I. One quick answer is to buy an inexpensive Micro Innovations USB210P hub and put it between the Dell and the KVM. Amazon sells the hub as of this writing. I originally had links to the support forum and to the hub on Amazon, but review guidelines do not allow URLs. Sorry!
Everyone in the forum who has tried this hub reports success, and it doesn't even need to be powered. Mine will be here in two days. In the meantime I tried two other hubs and a USB card, and they didn't help, which also mirrored other people's experiences. Only a few products are known to fix the problem, and the Micro Innovations USB210P was the easiest to find. The iRocks IR-4300 hub also works.
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Finally a product that works as advertised (and better)
By Tx
I honestly think that this would have to be one of the easiest setups I have ever been through for a KVM switch.
And what a pleasant surprise to find that its able to deal with above spec resolutions with no video artifacts.
My setup includes:
Port1: DELL 4600C w/ GeForce4 @ 1600 x 1200
Port2: Mac mini w/ ATI controller @ 1920 x 1200
Port3: Mac Powerbook G4 w/ Radeon 9700 @ 1920 x 1200
Port4: Not used *yet*
Display: Apple Cinema Display 23" native resolution 1920 x 1200
Given the KVM is only rated for 1600 x 1200 dpi, the fact that the Macs can drive the display at higher resolution is simply a bonus. And I'd have to add that the higher resolution comes at no cost to quality or clarity.
If only every product could be unpackaged, plugged in, and simply work.
Sharing a Windows keyboard with the Macs also works rather well ... but that has more to do with OS X than the IOGEAR KVM.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Functional, but ...
By Michael Hay
I bought the Iogear 4-port DVI switch to use with 3 Macs and a PC. I was excited about the potential to use all of my DVI-based computers with my nice 20" Apple display. Unfortunately, because of a bone-headed decision on the part of Iogear, the switch doesn't work as well as I would have liked.
When you have DVI connections, the display sends a special ID to the computer, so that the computer knows exactly what it is connected to. That's cool, and it's a standard feature of DVI displays. When this switch switches to another computer, however, the ID that the switch sends to the "inactive" computers is NOT the ID of the display which is still connected to the console port of the switch! The "inactive" computers all get a new ID that they think is a VGA display. This is the bone-headed move.
The fact that the display changes every time you switch away from a computer causes the computer to reconfigure for the new display, and in short, it's a hassle.
Considering that this switch has only DVI connections , I would have expected Iogear to have done a better job handling DVI.
If you connect a PC with Windows XP, it will work fine. If you connect Mac laptops, it will work ok, but the 2nd screen will keep switching as described above. If you connect a Mac Pro tower, you're hosed.
I was able to get my Mac Pro tower to play nice with the switch by inserting a Gefen DVI Detective between the Mac and the switch. If you're having trouble, you could look into that. But, if you haven't bought yet, you should look into the Gefen KVM switch as an alternative.