If you use and Mac and a PC, you might be tempted to get Apple’s new Studio Display
so you can use it for both computers. But I'm here to tell you why that might not be such a
good idea and if you insist, I will walk you through how I finally got this setup to work,
so you don't have to go through the five chords I went through in order to get the display working.
So why is this setup not a great idea for using a PC? And specifically, in my case,
a gaming PC? First, the Studio Display is a 5k 60 hz display, so if you’re a serious gamer,
you're likely going to want to display with a higher refresh rate.
And you also probably don't need a 5k display and will be fine with just a 4K display. But
what if you really like the color accuracy of the studio display, the overall look,
what's the issue with using it with a PC?
The second reason using this display with a Windows PC isn't a great idea is there's
no native way within Windows to control its brightness. You can only control its
brightness on a Mac, and there's no button anywhere on the studio display to get to
some menu to adjust its brightness like you see with most other monitors.
The third reason this is a bad idea, is unlike most monitors, it only has one single port for
display input, in this case a Thunderbolt 3 port. While there are 4 USB-C ports in total
on the back, the other three are downstream connections meant for connecting peripherals,
storage, and networking devices. So if you want to switch inputs, you'll need to manually
unplug one USB-C cable from your Mac and then plug in the other one from your PC.
So, after hearing all of those downsides, if you still think this is a good idea. Well,
here's what happened to me when I tried to get this setup to work. I looked at the back of my PC,
which is an HP OMEN 30L with an AMD Radeon RX 6700XT graphic card. The graphics card has 3
DisplayPort outputs plus one HDMI output. So I ordered a cable off Amazon that’s one side USB-C
and the other side DisplayPort. I got the cord, plugged it into the PC, and then the
Studio Display and nothing happened thinking. Well, thinking I just must have got a bad cord,
I bought several different ones on Amazon from different brands, even one that was HDMI to USBC.
Even though I didn't think that one was going to work. I plugged them in one by one and absolutely
none of them worked. And by this time, I'm thinking, okay, what the hell is going on here?
Well, here's what was going on. The Studio Display, it's expecting a
Thunderbolt signal. Now, a lot of PCs don't have Thunderbolt and that's actually okay.
When it doesn't get a Thunderbolt signal, the studio display will happily take a DisplayPort 1.4
signal. Now, here's where the problem is, though. It seems like the Studio Display
will only take a DisplayPort 1.4 signal if the cable you're using has a high enough bandwidth.
And a lot of the cables you see on Amazon that have one DisplayPort end and one USB-C
one, they’re made to plug the USB-C end into your computer and the Display-Port end into a monitor.
And shoutout to Justin Searls who wrote a blog post, which I’ll link down below,
about his own experience trying to do this and he pointed me in the direction
of a Displayport to USB-C cable made by Cable Matters on Amazon that worked
for him. And I've left the link to this chord in the description below.
So, I bought this cable, I plugged it into the PC, and then I plugged it in the Studio Display
and it worked…and not only did it work, it was displaying Windows and glorious 5k.
So, I finally got this setup to work, but it's still probably not optimal for a lot of people out
there who want to use the Studio Display’s camera and it's speakers because in order to use those,
you'll need to actually use Thunderbolt from the PC to the Studio Display,
and about the only other way I've seen to get Thunderbolt onto a PC, that doesn't already
support it is to buy a Thunderbolt card and plug it in directly to the motherboard
like the GC Titian Ridge Card made by Gigabite where it’ll fit into one of the PCIE slots on your
computer’s motherboard and then you can plug in a Displayport cable from your Graphics card into
the Thunderbolt card and then use a Thunderbolt cord to plug your PC into the Studio Display.
Alright. I know this has been a lot and hopefully this helps walk you through why I don't think
this setup is optimal at all for Windows PC users but it also helps illustrate like,
it shouldn't be this hard to connect even two Macs simultaneously into a single Studio
Display and then just switch inputs so you're not always unplugging cords and certainly,
it should not be this hard to connect a PC into a display. No matter who made the display. This
will certainly be something I'll cover in the full six months later review of the Studio Display. So
if you want to see that review, make sure you're subscribed to the channel.
If you have any further questions, leave them in a comment below. And if you found this video
entertaining watching my torment trying to get the setup to work. Or if you found it helpful,
hit that thumbs up button. And if you're looking for what to watch next,
check out some of our other Apple reviews like our review of the iPhone 13 Pro, iPad Mini,
Apple TV 4K, and the HomePod Mini. For 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder, thanks for watching.