Hardware Geeks

The folks over at Aten sent us one of there new KVM’s. What makes this KVM special is the inclusion of dual-link DVI, 7.1 Audio and a USB 2.0 hub. I’ve been using the KVM now in my home setup for a little over a week now. Read on to see how it measures up!

This KVM was a breeze to setup, even with having to rearrange my desk a bit to get the proper resting place for my laptop I had everything laid out and ready in under twenty minutes. The cables are plenty long enough for most situations, easily reaching from the center to the end of both arms of my L shaped desk. I ended up velcroing the KVM to the underside of where my monitor sits in the center panel of my desk.

The 7.1 audio cable is separate from the main KVM cable. So if you don’t need the 7.1 audio you don’t need to plug in the second cable with all the connections for it saving you some extra space and wire routing. For my purposes I only needed it coming off the desktop.

The layout is pretty straightforward, following the standard kvm layout. The blue/grey area is for console out, with an additional USB directly below the keyboard and mouse usb ports, along with a fourth accessible from the front. I currently have my USB headset plugged in here and have the fourth in front open for swapping out various devices. They also supplied a traditional audio out and microphone input jack in front for those with headsets.

One of the features of this KVM I’ve liked the most is you can transfer focus of USB, Console and Audio independently of one another. This comes in handy when you’re playing music from one device while you’re doing another task on your other computer. There are different hot key combinations for switching each point of focus. Quickly pressing the button for the other computer while switch console status while USB and audio remain on the current focus target. Holding the button down for a few seconds will cause it to do a single beep and move all focus to the target device.

This device has been a huge time saver and very convenient. I just bought a new laptop a few weeks back and with it I’ve been able to easily setup multi-monitor support on both the laptop and the desktop (running a laptop at 3840x1200 resolution by the way is just awesome). It’s increased my home productivity just by the screen real estate gains. The ease of use and flexibility of the device is unparalleled. Overall a great KVM for the high end home user, or the office user. As a programmer especially it’s come in very handy.

Overall:


Good-

Dual-Link DVI! Running my 28” monitor at native res is just awesome off of a KVM.

7.1 Audio, this was something I didn’t think I’d care too much about but it’s really come in handy.

USB hub, all my generic usb devices are plugged in to the KVM and shared between my laptop and desktop now.

Fixed my issues with docking my laptop at my home office.

Bad-

The basic KVM cables split a bit close to the cable ends making it so I had to use another audio cable to reach the audio out on my laptop.

Post Tags: review  aten  cs1782  kvm 

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