One of the best ways to double your productivity on a laptop or any computer is to get a second monitor, but why stop there? Wouldn’t three monitors triple your productivity? Just how many monitors can you connect to a single laptop anyways?
Most laptops can support 1–3 external monitors. The exact number depends on a number of factors, including the age of the laptop, the quality of its graphics card, and the number of video ports it has. You can use a splitter (HDMI or otherwise) to add additional ports as needed.
So, if you want to determine the exact number of external monitors that your laptop can support, you’ll need to know how to check those factors. Let’s go through the topic in more detail in order to help you get as much screen space as possible.
How Many Monitors Can Your Laptop Support?
The number of monitors a laptop can support isn’t the same across the board, and it often differs based on a few primary factors. These factors include how old the laptop is, the quality of the laptop’s graphics card, and the connectivity ports on the laptop.
How Old Is the Laptop?
One of the biggest factors that will impact how many monitors your laptop can support is how old your laptop is. Many of the features that laptops come with are often dependent on what was available in the year that the laptop released.
For one of the most extreme examples, if your laptop is over 15 years old at this point, it may not even be able to support one extra monitor, let alone more than one. This is due to an older laptop’s relatively limited specifications.
Older laptops tend to have completely outdated video cards and well below average GPU, making it difficult for them to work with multiple monitors. They also tend to only have one video output port.
A newer laptop, on the other hand, will have not only the specs to support an extra monitor — or even a couple of extra monitors — but also multiple video ports to use. This makes it much easier to support multiple extra monitors with a newer laptop than with an older one.
Quality of the Graphics Card
A graphics card, also known as a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), is a specialized piece of hardware that’s responsible for rendering images and videos on a computer. It’s an essential component for any process done on a computer, including for connecting multiple monitors.
When connecting a second monitor to a laptop, the graphics card plays a critical role in allowing the computer to display the image on both screens.
The graphics card is responsible for sending the image data to the monitor, and it must be powerful enough to handle the additional workload of displaying two images at once. In our case, we’re looking to connect as many monitors to our laptop as possible, so the graphics card needs to display even more images at once.
In order to determine whether your graphics card is good enough to support multiple different monitors, you first need to figure out which graphics card you have. To to this, you just need to follow these simple steps for your device:
On a Windows Laptop
- Open your laptop’s start menu by clicking on the Windows icon in the bottom left corner.
- Type “Device Manager” in the search bar and hit Enter.
- Open up the option that says “Display Adapters.” (The device manager is in alphabetical order, so look in the D’s.)
- On this page, you should be able to see the name of your graphics card.
On a MacBook
- Open the Apple menu by clicking on the Apple icon in the top left corner.
- In the menu that drops down, click on “About This Mac.”
- This should open a menu where you can read all of the specifications of your MacBook, one of these being the name of your graphics card.
Once you have the name of your graphics card, a quick Google search will reveal the number of external monitors that your graphics card should be able to handle. In turn, this is the number of external monitors that your laptop can hypothetically handle at once.
Connectivity Ports
Now we have the number of monitors your graphics card can handle, but there’s just one more thing that could potentially hold you back from reaching this number: the video ports present on your laptop.
Most laptops only come with one video output port, or maybe two if you’re lucky. And that means you only have the capacity to connect cables to one or two monitors. Thankfully, this issue is entirely fixable.
What you need is known as an HDMI splitter. This device is a box that takes a signal from one HDMI output and converts it into two more HDMI outputs, essentially turning your laptop’s one HDMI port into two HDMI ports.
HDMI splitters can usually be found at a reasonable price. For example, this splitter from GANA (on Amazon) is capable of outputting at a 4K resolution, and it’s than $20.
These devices also exist for the many other types of video output ports out there. For example, if you have a MacBook that uses the thunderbolt port for video output, this splitter (on Amazon) turns one thunderbolt port into two.
So, in order to plug your laptop into two different monitors, all you’ll need is an HDMI splitter and three different HDMI cords. Once you have everything you need, make sure that your laptop and two monitors are plugged in and turned on.
After everything is on, begin by connecting your laptop to the HDMI splitter by plugging one side of an HDMI cord into the HDMI port on your laptop and connecting the other side of the same HDMI cord into the side of the HDMI splitter that only has one HDMI port on it (or the side labeled “Input”).
Next, connect the HDMI splitter to both of your monitors by first plugging one side of an HDMI cable into one of the slots on the HDMI splitter and then plugging the other end into the HDMI port on your monitor. After this, Windows or macOS should automatically detect and start projecting onto your two monitors.
How to Set Up an External Monitor on Your Laptop
To connect your laptop to a monitor, connect one side of a video cable to the video output port on your laptop and connect the other side of the same cable to the video input port on your monitor. If the monitor is connected and on, your laptop should detect and set up the monitor automatically.
One of the biggest issues that many people run into is that when they connect a second monitor to their laptop, instead of getting two distinct desktops that they can switch between, they end up with two views of the same desktop. This is known as screen mirroring, and it’s actually a setting that you can turn off.
The steps here will differ based on what kind of laptop you have. Let’s go through how to do it on each so that you can get your screens separated.
How to Un-Mirror Your Screens on a MacBook
- Open the Apple menu in the top left corner of the screen and select “System Preferences” from the menu that appears.
- In the System Preferences menu, select the “Displays” tab (usually represented by an icon that looks like a monitor).
- If you have multiple displays connected and on, you should be able to select a tab that says “Arrangement.”
- In the Arrangement tab, you should see a box containing an icon for every screen connected to your MacBook. Uncheck the box that says “Mirror Displays.”
How to Un-Mirror Your Screens on a Windows Laptop
- Open the Windows Start menu by clicking the Windows icon in the bottom left of your taskbar.
- Click on the gear icon on the left of the Start menu to open your laptop’s settings.
- In the Windows Settings, click on “System” to get to the System Settings.
- On the left panel, select “Display.”
- Finally, under “Orientation,” change it from “Duplicate these displays” to “Extend these displays.”