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I am planning to use Surface Pro 2 with a dock station as my main computer and I would like to connect two external monitors to it, but the dock station only contains a single DisplayPort socket. However, I see that DisplayPort 1.2 specification, approved in 2009, allows for daisy-chaining monitors through its Multi-Stream Transport feature.

How do I tell if I will be able to use two monitors in daisy-chain mode with my computer?

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  • I have a Surface Pro 2 and I have used it with two Dell U2515H monitors via the Display Port. The monitors were 2560 x 1440 and it could drive them fine, no dock was used though.
    – Des Horsley
    Jul 14, 2015 at 3:41

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Surface Pro 2 ships with either i5-4200U or i5-4300U CPU, both Haswell chips with HD Graphics 4400 GPU. According to Intel, these chips have 4th generation graphics (HD Graphics 4200 and up is 4th, 4000 and 2500 is 3rd) and thus support DisplayPort 1.2.

Apart from graphics adapter support, you will need compatible monitors. These monitors should be DisplayPort 1.2 compatible and feature two DisplayPorts (for input and output). According to this page from DisplayPort.org (click 'DP Displays Multi-Stream' then 'Search') there are currently seven such models:

Or, you could use DisplayPort 1.2 MST hub like this one: not quite daisy-chain, but a solution to connect up to 3 DisplayPort monitors to a single DP 1.2 MST output. The monitors can be regular old-school DP 1.0, according to this answer.

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    is it possible to use a legacy non-DP monitor with such a hub?
    – prusswan
    Jul 3, 2014 at 11:56
  • @prusswan, supposedly, yes, see what the last sentence says.
    – cnst
    Apr 19, 2015 at 21:00
  • The list is out of date. There are monitors, like the Dell U2415M that support DP 1.2 but aren't listed on that product page.
    – Ehtesh Choudhury
    Feb 10, 2017 at 22:47
  • @EhteshChoudhury Could you please edit the answer?
    – Nickolai Leschov
    Feb 11, 2017 at 18:52
  • So if a monitor only has one display port on the back (not two. Only one display port which I'm assuming is a 'DP in'), this means it can't daisy chain without having something like a DP hub? This one display port cant be used as a 'DP out' if I use another port like VGA to deliver the video signal?
    – Kyle Vassella
    Jun 19, 2017 at 17:37

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