Mirroring my computer to 2 different desks on two different floors of the house

So, I have my computer in my home office. Sometimes though, I want to sit down and work at my computer from another room up on the 2nd floor.

My current setup is 3x 24" monitors connected via DisplayPort to my nvidia 3700. What I would like to be able to do is have 3 monitors at a desk upstairs where I can basically "mirror" the displays and have a keyboard, mouse, and audio at the 2nd desk. I have an ethernet cable I can connect to my little server closet and patch the signal up to the other room. So, a hardline connection thru ethernet is possible.

One thing to note is that my monitors have a displayport passthrough so I can take the output of those monitors to feed directly.

So, 3x DisplayPort signals, a usb 2.0 and an audio feed.

Any ideas?

LinusTechTips has done a couple videos on stuff like this and it's always looked really expensive and hasn't been the most stable for him. I would probably buy a cheap refurbished dell from woot or some other seller that supports 3 monitors and then a remote desktop software to log into the other computer.

techieman33 said:

LinusTechTips has done a couple videos on stuff like this and it's always looked really expensive and hasn't been the most stable for him. I would probably buy a cheap refurbished dell from woot or some other seller that supports 3 monitors and then a remote desktop software to log into the other computer.

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I like the idea of remote desktop.

Dell Refurbished dot com. Almost always a coupon code for 30-50% off around "US Holidays on your calendar". You can almost always find something useful if your uses aren't demanding.

The ultra-mini PCs on Amazon are cute and some come with sketchy Windows installations and extra virii at no extra charge (YooToob vids for those interested). I've found Beelink to reliable and legit, with some well performing AMD Ryzen machines capable of 3 1080 outputs.

Easiest way is probably doing RDP for a remote desktop from a mini PC with the capability to drive 3 monitors. Video quality may be a little degraded but most of the heavy lifting is still happening on the primary PC and just streaming video and control to your remote PC. This is probably the cheapest way to do it.

For a more transparent experience, USB/video extenders over CAT6 would work though it would be a fair bit more expensive. If you're doing work, this likely isn't necessary -- gaming, watching videos, other stuff, it would be. Also -- IP options are even more expensive than point-to-point, so you'd have to weigh the cost of running more CAT6 (probably 1 per monitor, plus one for USB, plus an analog audio cable.)

Personally, I have 3 monitors at home -- but I only RDP with one. I generally find if I'm drafting or accessing work servers, I usually only need one monitor for that. Then I use the other two monitors for media, files I'm working on but syncing with OneDrive, a PDF viewer (Bluebeam), or browser windows. So I'm using 3 monitors all the time but only RDP'ing one. I can RDP multiple monitors, but that's just not my workflow -- and if I'm watching media for background noise or whatever else, I'm doing that locally and not over RDP.

Probably depends more on what exactly you want to do, if streaming to 3 monitors is actually necessary, and what level of performance you need. For drafting in CAD/Revit, RDP is perfectly fine but I certainly wouldn't game or watch videos over it.

What are your hard-and-fast constraints for what you need out of this setup?

MNicolai said:

Easiest way is probably doing RDP for a remote desktop

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Essentially how I'm working at the moment - PC with twin monitors connected over the internet to my desktop PC in the office 18 miles away. In this example I'm running over citrix, but that's just a detail to allow me to RDP to any of several machines I'm enabled for in the office, but there are lots of remote desktops, some of them free, which will do this without any specialist hardware to encode video etc.

dvsDave said:

So, I have my computer in my home office. Sometimes though, I want to sit down and work at my computer from another room up on the 2nd floor.

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Norton pcAnywhere. I assume you're okay with either Windows95 or 98.

Tight VNC it does VNC server and client... The difference between that and Remote desktop, is that Tight VNC is smart enough to pick up 2 or 3 monitors from the host. You can scale so that all are visible on one monitor remotely.(tiny). or you scale so that you are on one monitor but can mouse over to the edge and "slide" over to monitors 2 and 3... And it's free, so all it costs is the download and install time if you want to try it out.

jtweigandt said:

Tight VNC it does VNC server and client... The difference between that and Remote desktop, is that Tight VNC is smart enough to pick up 2 or 3 monitors from the host. You can scale so that all are visible on one monitor remotely.(tiny). or you scale so that you are on one monitor but can mouse over to the edge and "slide" over to monitors 2 and 3... And it's free, so all it costs is the download and install time if you want to try it out.

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Installed and tested tonight, would be good for productivity, but the refresh rate was awful, even down at the minimum polling rate (30ms). Parsec is next up on my list, tomorrow. The free version of Parsec will do 1 monitor, but the personal paid version will do multiple monitors.

jtweigandt said:

Tight VNC it does VNC server and client... The difference between that and Remote desktop, is that Tight VNC is smart enough to pick up 2 or 3 monitors from the host. You can scale so that all are visible on one monitor remotely.(tiny). or you scale so that you are on one monitor but can mouse over to the edge and "slide" over to monitors 2 and 3... And it's free, so all it costs is the download and install time if you want to try it out.

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I've used Tight VNC for many things. The one thing it won't do, last I checked, is sound. RealVNC does do sound. The catch is that the server software requires a paid subscription, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.

RDP works fine, VNC leaves a lot to be desired (in my opinion)... but Parsec would definitely have my vote here. At work we were proof of concepting some replacements for our Citrix environment and gave Parsec a whirl. We had a guy in India connect to a computer here in the United States via Parsec and he said it felt like he was sitting right in front of the machine with how low the latency was. Night and day difference compared to Citrix. So if their magic will work like that half-way around the world, you won't notice hardly any issues on the same network. It works very well for remote gaming (low latency, high framerates), so it should be able to hold up to just about anything you throw at it.

I've had good luck with AV access products. I'm using a 4K+USB ethernet extender to show CAD drawings from my large desktop in a conference room and it works remarkably well at 60Hz refresh rates. They have less expensive ones that are lower resolution that may work well for you at a better price.

https://www.avaccess.com/products/hdex60-dm/

dvsDave said:

Installed and tested tonight, would be good for productivity, but the refresh rate was awful, even down at the minimum polling rate (30ms). Parsec is next up on my list, tomorrow. The free version of Parsec will do 1 monitor, but the personal paid version will do multiple monitors.

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I'll take another look at my settings.. I get pretty good performance on my end. I might be running with encryption off, since it's a local setting. I actually even use it for a "double hop" Log in to a linux computer via a secure linke, and can administer multiple windows pc's remotely at our emergency center over the internet.

I'm 90% mac, but I've had amazing experience with Chrome Remote Desktop locally and remotely.
Even over the internet, I can watch a remote video at like 10fps.

Why not Remote Desktop?

Van said:

Why not Remote Desktop?

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Not sure if this was to me, but a regularly setup mac-mac, Apple Remote Desktop, even locally, has more latency than Google Remote Desktop.
The only exception is the newest implementation on Sonoma where you can enable "gaming mode" which somehow reduces the latency.

Ah, I was thinking of Windows RDP. I have very little latency, even on my VPN from home. But I don't deal with it in a performance environment.

As a note, windsows RDP is only available if the hosting computer is "pro" or above.
I'll give a +1 to Chrome remote desktop, it's consistently been the best all around performer for me, and usually works with multimedia playback as well, which is usually where RDP and VNC become unusable.

An honourable mention to Steam remote play, if only it weren't so hacky so use outside of games. It's honestly the best implementation i've seen.