Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I have a lot of monitors on my desk, but in particular I wanted to switch one of my Apple 30" monitors between my MacBook Pro and my Mac Pro.
This switch handles it.
The switch itself is quite heavily and robustly constructed--the case is metal and nicely built. It can handle the weight of the DVI cables hanging off it just fine.
I am using a Kinesis Freestyle Mac keyboard and this switch works great with it. My $12 Logitech mouse works fine with it too. I haven't really tried other USB devices/hubs yet.
I had to read the manual a bit to figure out how to change the default hot-key from scroll-lock to ctrl, but now that I have done that, the switch lets me switch from one computer to the other by simply hitting ctrl-ctrl-enter. Very nice.
There's absolutely none of the "old school" KVM issues here; after all, DVI is digital. But if you're worried about dual-link DVI issues, I don't think you have to worry about this with this switch--2560x1600 comes out just fine. I haven't tried other resolutions since I never change to other resolutions.
The other nice thing is that the switch includes all cables you'll need for hooking up sound, USB, DVI. I am not using the sound cables, but if I was, I'd need an extension cord for the audio to connect to the headphones port on the laptop. So keep this in mind if your ports are far away from each other. Speaking of cables, the Cinema display "breakout" cable is a bit of a pain to cable into this box--I had to put the power brick for the monitor near the KVM. This probably isn't too much of a problem though--now that the KVM is setup, I can probably just put it on the floor along with the power brick.
The switch is expensive, but worth it if you need dual-link DVI. As others have mentioned, you can selectively switch audio/USB/display without changing the others--for me, that isn't interesting. The front of the KVM offers a bit of feedback as to which connections are switched where, but on-screen display of this would be nicer (though far costlier to inject into the video stream, I would think). As a compromise, better LED indications on the KVM would be nice--illuminated icons would be much better for low light environments.
Overall, it's a great bargain and does what it's supposed to do--at a fraction of the cost and space of another monitor.
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