Tom's Hardware KVM Roundup

nexex writes: "Tom's Hardware has a new article with a review of several KVM switches. I have considering buying a KVM switch as I seem to collect/use more & more computers, I feel left with little choice :) While I have several friends who have taken the plunge, they have all spent wildly different amounts on them. Granted price plays a great factor on the features you get, but how do you know which one is not going to end up letting you down? If you end up with el cheapo, you will most certainly end up regretting it, as this device will be carrying the signals of your primary input and output to your systems."

Comments

Audio switching

[Chris Pimlott]

I'm surprised Tom is so exciting about audio switching. Most decent speaker setups will take more than 1 input signal, so you can have both (or more) boxes hooked up to the same speaker at once all the time. It's nice to be able to play a CD or something from my other box while I'm using the first's drive.

What about picture quality?

[Hank the Lion]

In the article, Tom has concentrated on go/no-go tests.
In a product that can influence picture quality tremendously, I would have liked to see something more than "It ... produced a good picture " (with no mention of the resolution tested) in case of the CS-USB21H , or no mention of picture quality at all in case of the GCS124U KVM .
It would have been really helpful to see characteristics like 'amount of reflections' or 'actual measured bandwidth'
This would have helped me more on deciding which unit is right for my purposes than describing the computer systems that were used in detail. What is the use of specifying the brand of CD-writer or the amount and brand of RAM that were used? I cannot imagine that these have any influence on the performance of the KVM switch.