SMART GX065 V3 Board and Dell Dock WD19s

[jholliday95]

Hello,

 

We have recently had a SMART GX065 V3 installed into one of our classrooms and it appears to be really flaky with our Dell WD19s Dock in terms of the HDMI connection. When we connect a HDMI cable directly to the laptop it works as expected however when connecting the laptop to the dock and running the HDMI through the dock the board flickers on and off the display, We have gotten the SMART GX65 series before but it appears to be an older model not the V3 but just the GX series and this has worked fine through the dock.

 

We can fix this temporary by going into the display settings within windows and changing the board refresh rate from 30hz to 60HZ while on the android screen on the board and then flicking back to HDMI however as soon as the board turns off this setting gets reset and the next teacher will have to update these settings, also the board works fine off a 30hz refresh rate when connected directly to the laptop via just an HDMI cable.

 

We have tried with both a 130W and 180W Dell Dock but get similar results.

 

We have updated the Laptops BIOS and Display Drivers, updated the firmware on the docks as well as checking the GX Smartboards firmware is up to date

 

Is this just because the V3 of the SMART GX boards will not work smoothly with the Dell Docks when previous GX Boards had or is there something I am missing.

 

Any Advice would be appreciated.

[Oaktech]

Try changing the HDMI version to 1.4 in the board settings. It's made a massive difference in terms of display stability for us.

[jholliday95]

Thanks for the suggestion but sadly this has not worked, Do you run the SMART GX series boards??

[Oaktech]

Yes - and we've seen the similar issues.

 

The other thing I thought of was how long is your cable run?

 

I'd forgotten we'd done this... We had to reduce our cable runs to get a stable connection to our old 4065 boards which happened to be in the same places. The old connection was almost 20m and went up and across the ceiling and when we changed from desktop PCs to docks we had problem on the 4065 with it repeatedly disconnecting and showing artefacts. We reduced them all to 5m by going direct around the wall and it made the connection stable.

 

I tried our docks (Dell 3100 and WD19) after work on Friday, 1-5m cables were stable but at 10m the connection does what you're describing. I'll take 7 and 8m cables to try tomorrow.

[Colt_phil]

We had this and the only way it would work reliably was running Displayport from the screen to the dock. Been faultless since.

[jholliday95]

Thank you we even tried the display to HDMI and got the same result, but the Display port direct to the dock works.

 

Now time to test a display port running through the same Dell Docks with the SMART 4065s as we have had issues getting sound through to the board through the dock on the HDMI cable with these boards.