Windows isn’t the only game in town these days for a consumer friendly operating system. LINUX is stepping up their game, running as the standard OS for many netbooks and some desktop systems and you’re definitely seeing more Macs at the local Internet Cafe. Each OS has its strengths which is why some people choose to run both Windows and Mac OS based systems. But do you need to run a monitor, mouse and keyboard for each system?
In order to get all the horsepower out of an OS, you need to have the dedicated hardware, but what you don’t need to have is a set of dedicated monitors, mice and keyboards for each box. That’s where IOGEAR comes in with their line of KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switches that allow you to run multiple systems from a single set of peripherals. Today we’ll be looking at one of IOGEAR’s products called the IOGEAR GSC1204 4 Port Dual-Link DVI KVMP Switch: The perfect solution to a multi-OS environment.
Features and Specifications
The IOGEAR GCS1204 is a four port KVMP switch that supports Dual-Link DVI connectivity. I assume the “P” on the end of “KVM” stands for the fact that it also supports printer sharing via one of it’s two USB 2.0 ports. Because of the Dual-Link DVI support, this switch will go up to a 3840 x 2400 resolution with full HDCP pass-through support. That means you could run a single 30 inch monitor easily and have it available for up to four different systems running four different supported operating systems. Display emulation software onboard also remembers the monitors optimal settings, allowing seamless switching and boot up from system to system.
While providing control from a single mouse and keyboard, the GCS1204 also allows you to seamlessly share USB 2.0 capable peripherals like USB drives, scanners, printers and other USB devices using the built in 2 port powered USB 2.0 hub. The unit also allows sharing of a set of speakers and a microphone via a set of inputs in the back. Switching is done using a hotkey combo from the keyboard, or manually use of the buttons on the front panel.
Topping off this enchilada are features like upgradeable firmware to support future OS features and a three year warranty. Of course, there is a price and you can have all this for only $499.95 US. It’s not cheap that’s for sure but it’s a lot cheaper than buying four sets of mice, keyboard and monitor. More hardcore specs are available here. For the rest of you, let’s see if this thing is really worth the price of admission.
What’s In The Box?
Naturally, for about $500 you’d expect some really cool stuff in the box. Well, if high quality cables and minimal paperwork is cool enough for you, then the GCS1204 has that covered.
Inside the box, you get our GCS1204 KWMP Switch, but you’ll also get a manual and registration card. Four sets of custom 6ft DVI/Audio/Mic cables are also included along with a PS2 to USB adapter for you old school peripheral peeps and the firmware upgrade cable. A power adapter is also provided to give the device the juice it needs to power up to four systems.
First Impressions
I’d be royally disappointed if this thing felt like a feather instead of a good paperweight. Luckily, it is the latter but hopefully doesn’t function like one.
The GCS1204 is definitely made of sterner stuff and has a well weighted feel, allowing it to stay put on your desk as you cable it up to all your systems. The front panel is fairly plain, but the brushed aluminum gives it a bit of class. The buttons are part of the aluminum panel and provide a very solid feel when pushed to activate one of the four ports. The switch supports scanning of the ports with a user definable interval from 1 – 99 seconds and can allow individual switching of focus for the USB Hub and Audio or it can leave both alone and just switch KVM focus. The focus is indicated by a green and orange LED indicator on each port.
Also on the front are an audio and mic jack which would come in handy if you use a headset. The front panel also harbors one of the two powered USB 2.0 ports and can be used for pretty much anything. Right off the bat, I’d say a flash card reader, maybe a web cam, or even a scanner.
Moving to the back, you’ll see the four ports that you use to hook up your machines. The first set of ports on the left hand side is where you would plug in your monitor, USB keyboard and mouse and any other USB peripheral you’d want to share out, like a USB hard drive for instance or a printer. The mic and speaker jack is also here and is where you would plug in your shared set of speakers and a microphone if you aren’t using a headset.
Finally, the cables are thick and well shielded and the mic and speaker jacks even have plugs that allow you to cover them when they aren’t in use. This minimizes the chance that a dangling speaker or mic cable could cause feedback and noise if it came in contact with anything. Caps are also provided for the DVI portions in case you want to wire everything up, but not plug anything in yet. Nice touch.
System Requirements
The GCS1204 requires that every system have a DVI port and that every system has USB (PS2 via an adapter for mouse and keyboard). Optional bits would be a set of 2.1 or 2.0 powered speakers and a microphone.
Although the switch will properly scale your monitor to the right resolution, it is best if all your systems run the same optimal resolution for your monitor. If you have a 24 inch monitor, you want to run all systems at 1920 x 1200, but if you want to run a 30 inch monitor your video card must also support dual-link DVI and the higher 2560 x 1600 resolution and not all systems support this high of a resolution. For testing, we used a Dell 2405 monitor and ran it at 1920 x 1200 at 60 Hz with all attached systems.
The GSC1204 officially supports Windows, Mac, SUN and LINUX and offers some really impressive keyboard and mouse emulation so that you can use your favorite wired or wireless desktop while maintaining most if not all of the functionality you are used to and we will be testing this thoroughly. Allegedly, it even supports the rather difficult to support Apple Aluminum Keyboards so stay tuned if you’re a Mac Lover. Since we only have PCs running Vista, a MacBook Pro and a PowerPC based Mac Mini we couldn’t do the SUN systems or LINUX test but we’d be happy to report back in the forums should we come across one of these systems.
Hooking It All Up
The actual task of plugging in everything was a piece of cake and we were up and running in no time. As you can see, it’s a good thing that the GCS1204 has some weight to it because you don’t want all those heavy cables dragging it off the table. Once power was connected, we were good to go.
Performance and Compatibility
There are a few key areas that will form my opinion of the GCS1204. First of all, the switch must work seamlessly with keyboards and mice from any of the operating systems that we have tested and they must provide proper switching support from the keyboard without having to resort to pushing a button on the front of the switch. Also, the switch must work properly with special mousing perhipherals like mice with programmable functions, or alternative mousing devices.
The next two areas that we will have to look at is audio performance and video performance. The KVM switch must not interfere with either and provide an as close to a hooked up directly experience as possible. Fuzzy pictures or noise in the audio are both bad JuJu in my opinion and would go against that seamless system switching experience. Let’s get to work!
Keyboard Compatibility
I hooked up a PC keyboard for just some basic testing of all the special functions and to test out the switching. As expected, my Saitek Eclipse II keyboard worked just as it does hooked up directly to any of my systems. I even tried out a keyboard that lacked drivers for OSX, the Logitech DiNovo Edge Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard and it worked fine as well, allowing me to Hotkey to the different systems without issue and it seemed to type just fine, though none of the function keys worked due to the lack of drivers. This wasn’t surprising, but I did like the fact that the switch didn’t complain when a wireless keyboard was used.
Switching to the infamous Apple Aluminum Keyboard did cause issues that required me to totally reset the switch and then power it up again with the keyboard attached. Once that was done, I was able to use the keyboard properly including all the function keys. The strange thing was that after I did this, I was able to swap keyboards no problem. Weird, but it gets weirder.
When I was trying to switch between the different systems using the hotkey sequence on the Mac Aluminum, which is tapping the Num Lock button (the Clear Key on the Aluminum Apple Keyboard) twice and then hitting the number of the port (1 – 4) then enter. The keyboard would not send the right command to the GCS1204. I looked for solutions on the IOGEAR site as well as GOOGLE and it looked like more bad news about this keyboard and a KVM switch to cooperate.
Purely by accident, I enabled the alternate Hotkey Setting Mode, which allowed me to use the CTRL key instead of the Clear/NumLock key. Once this was done, I was able to Hotkey into any system by hitting CTRL twice, the number of the port, then the enter key. Problem solved, but this was not in the manual and wasn’t even in their support FAQ. No wonder people were having issues and yes, IOGEAR, you owe me for this!
Mouse Compatibility
My stash of Logitech generic mice didn’t seem to have any problems with this switch whatsoever. No complains on the Mac or PC side of things. I then started getting fancy and introduced the Logitech G9, which is my favourite gaming mouse. Again, no issues with compatibility. I even used the recently reviewed Microsoft X8 Wireless Gaming Mouse and this is where the problems started to happen.
Although the mouse was able to work like a regular mouse without all the function buttons, the rest of the buttons didn’t seem to show up in the Intellipoint Control Panel in both PC or Mac. A quick look in the manual revealed that there was a mode to disable mouse emulation control, and sure enough, after activating it with the hotkeys, it allowed the software to see the mouse and all the functions started to work after I unplugged and replugged the wireless receiver.
I took it one extra step and tried out the rather unconventional Cyber E Sports Orbita Mouse, which relies on its software quite heavily to make it useful. With the mouse emulation on, the Orbita’s software didn’t know it existed. With the mouse emulation off, the Orbita worked as it should and the software recognized it (including the battery meter). I guess this function is there for non-supported OSes so that you can use the same rodent throughout. However, under both Vista and OSX, it was no problem.
Audio Performance
Audio performance was a little hit and miss. With an already clean signal coming from a high-end external sound card like the ASUS XONAR Essence STX, there was just a hint of a buzz from the headphone output on the front panel. This is not unlike what you’d experience if you were using the front panel outputs on a regular computer case. However, if the source is already noisy to begin with, it has a tendency to amplify it. I noticed that the sound coming from the MacBook Pro was particularly noisy and buzzy. Laptops are already susceptible to noise and the switch only made it worse.
Having the front panel inputs and audio switching is definitely convenient, but if you are recording or if you’re listening to music, I’d go direct if I could, rather than through the switch for the best possible audio and recording experience.
Video Performance
The ability of the switch to keep the signal clean is probably thanks to the high quality cables that it ships with. The extra shielding probably made an impact to the signal quality as I noticed no strange anomalies in picture quality. The picture was probably, at worse, 95% of what it would be had I hooked the monitor directly to the source while running the screen at 1920 x 1200 from all sources at 60Hz. Since I didn’t have a monitor that supported resolutions above 1920×1200, I wasn’t able to go any higher for you. But if you run 24 inch monitors, you should be quite pleased with the performance as it is.
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
When the world was all PC, it was easy to pick out a KVM switch because they all worked fine with PCs. But today, the computer landscape is a little different because we have computers running other operating systems and in growing numbers too. IOGEAR provides us with a very compelling, top end solution that does it all with few issues that we weren’t able to iron out (and a few that we couldn’t). I guess the saying goes, it’s hard to please everyone all of the time.
Where it did well was in its compatibility with a number of different mice and keyboards. From unique new products like the Cyber E Sports Orbita Mouse to the exotic Logitech DiNovo Edge Bluetooth Keyboard, the IOGEAR GCS1204 showed that it wasn’t just another KVM switch. I’ve had other switches in the past and it’s pretty clear that IOGEAR did their homework here when it came to compatibility. I just wish they had provided a solution for the Apple Aluminum Keyboard without me having to come up with one on my own and I’ll be collecting on this at the next IOGEAR sponsored party. Also, the USB 2.0 hub seemed to work well with things from smartphones to video camcorders so another check for the GCS1204.
Although not entirely the fault of the GCS1204, as noted audio seems to be a problem as the noisier your source is, the noisier it is played through this switch. If you’re recording or mastering music or videos, I would probably stick to going directly through the system for that.
Overall, at $499 US it definitely isn’t cheap, but this is definitely a top of the line KVM Switch that is by far the most compatible that I’ve come across. The fact that it supports crazy high resolutions is a bonus when you finally upgrade to that 30 inch monitor. Also, if you buy this product, you won’t have to buy four sets of keyboard, mice and monitors. You’ll also have far more desk space for other things.
Pros
- Strong compatibility with a host of different mice and keyboards under Windows and OSX
- Support for high video resolutions and memoriztion of video resolution settings on boot
- High quality build with enough weight to hold down up to four systems
- I love the extra desk space I’ve claimed back
Cons
- The price of entry may deter some users (but it has few competitors)
- Troubleshooting documentation needs improvement
Overall Rating: 9.0 / 10.0
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IOGEAR (GCS1204) 4 Port Dual-Link DVI KVMP Switch Photo Gallery
