Daisy Chain a LED Cinema Display to a Thunderbolt Display

I currently have a Thunderbolt Display connected to my Mac and would like to get another display for work reasons.
I also have a gaming PC which i would like to connect to it, but as i dont have the thunderbolt motherboard i would have to use the LED Cinema Display instead.
So my question is can i get a LED Cinema display to work with my current Mac and Thunderbolt Setup?
Or would i have to use 2x Thunderbolt Displays?
I Only expect to get my gaming pc on one of the monitors, not both.
But i owuld like my Mac to run Dual Displays
Many Thanks
- Callum

Mini DisplayPort devices won't work when plugged directly into a Thunderbolt display, but will work is you connect a disk drive (with two Thunderbolt ports) between the displays.

Similar Messages

Daisy chain monitor from cinema display MacBook Air 5,2

I know the Mid-2012 MacBook Air is capable of 2 external displays as described here.
The monitor works when plugged directly into the MBA, but not when daisy chained from the back of the cinema display.
It's a dell monitor, and I'm using an Apple Thunderbolt-VGA adaptor.
Is there something I'm missing? Thanks!

As far as my question itself -- why does this happen? Has anybody had this issue on Lion and had it resolved on Mountain Lion?

There is no display on Apple Thunderbolt display, when Daisy chain connect with six LaCie Little Big Disks.

Hi, Everyone,
I have aquestion with Thunderbolt daisy chan.
I have six LaCie Little Big Disks and Apple Thunderbolt Display to make daisy chan and I got a problem.
I place the Apple Thunderbolt Display at the end of the chain, and six LaCie Little Big Disks infront, and Apple Thunderbolt Display does not show anything.
If I plac the dell u2711 (DP1.1) Display at the end of the chain, and six LaCie Little Big Disks infront , dell u2711(DP1.1) displays.
If I place the Apple Thunderbolt Display at the end of the chain,and five LaCie Little Big Disks infront. Apple Thunderbolt Displays well.
Is it because the hardware limitation that Thunderbolt daisy chan can only have maximum 6 Thunderbolt deivce?
Apple Thunderbolt Display Should be DP1.2, why it doesn’t display?
My workstation running Windows 7x64 or Windows8.1x64
Thanks ,Myron

if you reduce the number of disks to 5 and the display works, I think we'll have your answer.

Is daisy chaining on a macbook air through the thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adaptor possible?

Hello,
I am attempting to daisy chain two Glyph portagig 50's and connect them to my MacBook Air. They are both 1TB, 7200RPM drives and are both connected to external power. When I attempt the daisy chain only the first drive mounts and when I attempt to connect the second drive to it, the first (mounted) drive ejects and the second drive does not mount. Both drives need to be turned off and on again in order for either to be remounted.
I contacted Glyph and they have said that it is most likely a problem with the Thunderbolt to FW800 adaptor. Which leads me to wonder whether or not daisy chaining through the adaptor is even possible.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
My MacBook Air is a mid-2011 model with a 1.8GHz Core i7 processor and 4GB of RAM, if that helps at all.
Thank you!

GeorgeFlick
They are both 1TB, 7200RPM drives and are both connected to external power.
Eeeek, dont do that anymore. 2.5" dont need power, and daisy chaining them BOTH thru thunderbolt, your Air is likely kicking one because youre mostly likely sending feedback THRU the firewire.
Some inventive folks unknowingly have powered (3.5" need power, 2.5" DONT) 2.5" thru USB and found out the hard way they deep fried circuitry.

Is it posible to connect dell u2711 with display port to thunderbolt display.

I want to buy a macbook pro 15 2011 and thunderbolt display.
But I got a dell u2711 and I want to use this screen.
my question. Can I connect macbook pro to thunderbolt to dell u2711. for dual 27 screen

Yes, you can.
I have a similar configuration : same monitor but my macbook pro is late 2013. use a displayport cable for best results. you will be able to get 2560 x 1440 resolution.

New Mac Pro display issues with Thunderbolt display

When connected to a 27inch Thunderbolt display after a while I get vertical blue lines on the display. If I plug my Macbook Air into the screen, after a while the blue lines clear. How do I find out if it's the Mac Pro or the Display?

Thanks Turbostar, that's exactly right, it takes about 30 minutes having the Air plugged in and the stripes disappear.

Why does daisy-chaining a Mini-DisplayPort monitor in a Thunderbolt chain cause overscan issues?

I have the awkward 2011 MacBook Pro with a single Thunderbolt port and no USB3. I very frequently use it connected to my HP 2311x LED Monitor. For the very first time, today I placed a external Thunderbolt drive in-between my MacBook Pro and the HP 2311x. This causes the image to severely overscan. Correcting it by using the underscan option in the display settings significantly reduces image quality.

Two more of interest:
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11407
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11409 which also says if a device works properly by itself, but then not correctly after the TB device, there may be a problem with the TB device.

Will my 27inch LED cinema display work with the 2014 MacPro?

I have two 27 inch LED cinema displays I bought in 2010 I think. I want to know if I can use both displays with the new cylindrical MacPro? My displays have mini display port connection and are non thunderbolt. I know that I cant daisy chain the monitors because they are NOT thunderbolt, but will I be able to connect both to the new MacPro's coming this December?

Thanks TurboStar for your excellent comments and suggestions. I have pre-ordered that Apple 27" LED Display now off Amazon.co.uk... it will be in stock on the 21st March.... and I look forward now with anticipation to getting my hands on it and more importantly my eyes... now that I have read your resounding approval of the 27" compared to my tired and jaded 30".
Interesting your comments about the new MacPro also... I think I went OTT when I bought my last 12 Core MacPro (32GB RAM + 512GB SSD)..... it cost me in total €8,800 ($12,200) which was mad money.... it's doing a great job.... but I don't work with video or video games, just Quark, Illustrator and Photoshop... so not sure if the 8 Core or less would have done the job just as good... I just wanted the best with what I thought was the most horsepower so I could take on any task. I will wait and review more with the New MacPro.... maybe the 6 Core is the way to go... and pump up the SSD and RAM....
Thanks again.
Regards,
Anthony
PS. Have a grrreat Paddys Weekend!!

Daisy Chaining Thunderbolt Monitors

I see that a 15 inch Macbook can drive two daisy chained Thunderbolt monitors. Can a post 2012 Air Book also do this?
Going in another direction, if i use the 15 Inch Macbook with a thunderbolt monitor, can i daisy chain in a Cinema Display to that?

I see that a 15 inch Macbook can drive two daisy chained Thunderbolt monitors. Can a post 2012 Air Book also do this?
Yes. See question 14 in:
<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5219>
Going in another direction, if i use the 15 Inch Macbook with a thunderbolt monitor, can I daisy chain in a Cinema Display to that?
Not directly (see question 16 above), but it will work if you connect a Thunderbolt disk drive (with two Thunderbolt ports) between the displays.

Has anyone been able to use an Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire to daisy chain a dozen or more FireWire drives?

Ever since I realized that I was not able to connect my FireWire daisy chain to my brand new Retina MBP there has been problems. Four months down the road, I am still unable to use my FireWire drives and have experienced terrible problems whenever I connect my FireWire daisy chain to this new Mac.
I have bought two of these adaptors from Apple now and both do the same thing. The daisy chain has been working perfectly for years with my older MBP and still does! There are no problems until I connect to the new Mac.
I have 15 various hard drives in NewerTech and DatOptics enclosures for over 22 TB. When connected to the new Mac, I would have multiple apps just hang, sometimes just Apple apps, sometimes 3rd party. I will not be able to force quit them and they will keep relauching as you can watch them in the Force Quit window. The Finder will hang and there is no relaunching it. I am having to do a force shutdown twice an hour which leaves no time for work!
After four months of this, now I am being told that Apple will buy back my Mac at full price. But I have basically lost the good part of four month’s worth of work because of constantly fighting the new Mac. This is cost me all my savings and I am about to lose a client. It certainly seems that releasing Thunderbolt1 was a huge, huge mistake.
Does anyone know of any large Fire Wire daisy chain working with Thunderbolt?
TIA,
R

Yes, my first post is all about how darn iffy the adaptors are and I have two of them to return now.
I question your answer because I am betting that four drives that are in one enclosure NOT all RAIDed together as one drive, but as four separate drives that those four drive will count as four devices. The daisy chain that I had going had eight drives in TWO quad boxes, four drives in TWO dual drives and another drive in a single enclosure. A total of five “devices” if you will, but also a total of 13 drives that were usually in this daisy chain.
Both of the Apple branded Thunderbolt to FireWire adaptors chocked BIG TIME on this and it works no problem on my older MBP. You basically can not use a new Mac when you are connected to a daisy chain like this!
Just checked the Apple website and indeed, I can get a new MBP with FireWire 800, just not with the Retina display! I wish that I would have known this five months ago before this all started!

How to connect two DVI screens to Thunderbolt Display's Thunderbolt Port?

Hi everyone,
I have a new MBP and an external Thunderbolt Display. The Thunderbolt Display itself has a Thunderbolt port, and I was wondering if there is anyway to connect to DVI screens to that. My goal is to have the Thunderbolt Display and 2 x 24" Samsung DVI screens connected to my MBP.
Alternatively, has anyone had success using a third party device like the Matrox 2 go to drive multiple monitors from the usb port?
Thanks,
Dave.

You could try a TB>DVI adapter (here's one from Monoprice) but I don't know that it will work - I'm thinking that you could have at least one of your Samsung displays use it. You may also want to see if you can find a HDMI>DVI adapter for your second Samsung display - something like this?
I know that I've seen three monitor set-ups on YouTube - but I'm not sure what was connected to what. Easy enough to daisy-chain ATDs but it gets a bit tougher when utilizing HDMI ports, etc., and I'm not sure about the GPUs ability to drive all three displays.
Oops - sorry - strike that second paragraph - I thought that you were running a Retina display MBP...
Clinton
Message was edited by: clintonfrombirmingham

Apple Thunderbolt Display-Connection confusion!

OK, I have quite a lot to explain here so this is going to be a big post.
In September, I'll be going to University to study Computer Games Animation and as such over the past few months I've sorted out the computer I need for the course, or I thought I did anyway. I intended to buy a Mac Pro (the upcoming model, following the rumours of an early August update for 2011) and two Apple 27" Cinema Displays. Along with this, I was going to purchase the Atlona HD620 (on one side of the device there is an MDp output and HDMI output to put in your Mac and 360 into and the other side is another MDp output to your display) to connect my Xbox 360 to one of the displays (MDp). I was aware that the HD620 doesn't work with the 2011 iMac due to Thunderbolt and thus it was possible I would run into the same problem with the new Mac Pro and displays. I kept my plan however and decided I'd look into it when the time came.
....and then it did.
Yesterday as I'm sure you're aware, Apple went and released the new Thunderbolt Display which did away with MDp completely. I looked into the new displays and Thunderbolt and as I now understand it, Thunderbolt is backwards compatible with MDp but obviously, MDp can't be forward compatible with Thunderbolt. In other words you can insert a Thunderbolt input cable into a MDp output but you can't insert a MDp input cable into a Thunderbolt output (right?). This would make sense regarding the HD620 and the new iMac as the iMac only possesses a Thunderbolt output forcing you to input Mdp from the HD60 into the Thunderbolt and thus, doesn't work.
This however is not the case with the Thunderbolt display. As I'm sure you're also aware, the Thunderbolt display possesses an output AND the built-in Thunderbolt cable. Now I wonder if using the Thunderbolt cable into the MDp output on the HD620 would work? The HD620 would then be connected to the Mac Pro via the Apple Thunderbolt cable from the (highly presumed) Thunderbolt output on the Mac Pro into the MDp output on the other side of the device and I'm hoping this would work. I'm also wondering, despite using Thunderbolt cables between the Mac Pro and the display, even if this does work, would the MDp element on the HD620 cancel out the USB outputs, speakers, FaceTime camera and mic functionalities on the display?
I hope this makes some sense, I've been rattling my brain over this for months and as much as I love the new displays, it's a real pain that they've come out now and shaken my plans. I hope there are members here who know what they're talking about a lot more than I do on the subject, my understanding here could be completely mistaken. Infact the more I think about it and the more I learn, the less confident I become. If this isn't right, is there any way this set up could work?
Thank you.

I'm in the same predicament. I'm making a series of purchase decisions, and unfortunately some are on hold until I can arrive to a solid conclusion. To give you some insight, I had the MacBook air with the MDp and just switched to a MacBook Air with the Thunderbolt primarily because I have a iMac 27" w/ Thunderbolt at the office i wanted to use as a external monitor.
With that said, I'm still waiting to decide on what to buy for the home to extend the MacBook Air as I have four choices:
- Cinema Display 27" w/ Mini DisplayPort
- Thunderbolt Display 27"
- iMac 27" with Thunderbolt (similar to office) (used in target display mode from time to time)
- iMac 27" with Mini DisplayPort (used in target display mode from time to time)
The burning question is, how do you plan to use the display and then determine if compatibility exists in those methods. In my case, I plan to use the display from OSX as well as Windows via Bootcamp. It turns out, through relentless research with a visit to the Apple store and purchases, I arrived to the colusions here:
http://mike952.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/thunderbold-and-minidisplay-mac-compatib ility-101/
It seems Mini DisplayPort works all around, meaning I can reboot and the display works even prior to the OSX loading, in BootCamp, etc. This lends credulence that the DisplayPort monitor will work with any DisplayPort device be it an XBox 360 or your latest cable box, whatever.
With thunderbolt, it seems as though the two end points need to be thunderbolt as they need to negotiate with each other and agree on how to transfer the video stream. This is validated somewhat with my bootcamp partition on my iMac 27" at work. When I boot into bootcamp, I cannot get the iMac27" to work in target display mode via the thunderbolt to thunderbolt with either mini displayport or thunderbolt cables. This is also documented on Apple support. However, Bootcamp does work fine with an iMac27" with Mini displayport and the thunderbolt MacBook via a mini display port cable (not a thunderbolt cable).
So the conclusion I've arrived thus far is the Cinema Display w/ Mini DisplayPort plug is more compatible with Mini Display or ThunderBolt sources (equally) however, it require the use of an additional USB connector to activate the isight camera and usb ports on the back while the Thunderbolt display, nice to have one plug enable all the features such as USB, isight camera, etc. however may not work with external displayport devices without some future adaptor or firmware updates with
With the iMac 27" thunderbolt, the devices need to be synchronized via thunderbolt in order to achieve the target display mode (meaning, they need to be on, macbook needs to be open to use the Command + F2) and there after you can close the MacBook to use the iMac 27" as the monitor.
With the newly released ThunderBolt display, and this is where I'm curious and wish Apple will step in and answer so I can make my purchase decision now, the question is will this display auto-synchronize with thunderbolt source (a requirement for it to work seamlessly when plugged in) and if so, this means their must be some software/hardware running in the monitor to accomplish this. Is this sync still broken when booting to BootCamp?
In other words, will BootCamp work with the thunderbolt display despite it not working with the iMac27" in target display mode?
As a software engineer, I'm inclined to say there are a few possible solutions here:
- firmware option to use thunderbolt port as a mini displayport and operating systems see it as so allowing for interoperability skipping the thunderbolt negotiation step
- bootcamp update allowing Windows to work with thunderbolt port similar to mac, allowing for negotation and the invokation of Command + F2 on iMac 27" and presumably auto negotiation and display iwth the Thunderbolt Display 27"
- some inteligent thunderbolt powered adapter which, when plugged in, tricks any device into seeing a mini displayport monitor and allowing it to function as so be it the iMac 27" in target dispaly mode OR the Thunderbolt display operating simply as a former cinema display. Whoever comes up with this adapter will be a millionair over night.

Can I connect my 27inch iMac to 2 other 27 inch iMac displays using 2 thunderbolt cables to create a 3 iMac canvas?

Any suggestions or personal experiences are welcome, thank you.

Hi Malcolm, Thank you for your valid help on this.
I read some rumours about the new Mac Pro comming with Thunderbolt, as it should be expected since all laptops and mac mini have one. Is your opinion that I should wait for the new Mac Pro to be anounced and then make my decision or should I just go ahead and buy the Thunderbolt displays since I am looking to purchase the Mac Pro in probably 2 years and by then they will almost for sure have Thunderbolt on them? Also could you please let me know if there is a big difference between the Cinema Display and the Thunderbolt Display beside the Thunderbolt conectivity, is the screen exactly the same? or is the TB faster?
Thank you for your help and imput on this

How to connect the macbook with thunderbolt display 27" to TV with RGB port?

Hi,
I have the following equipments in hands:
1. Macbook PRO 15 inch with 1 thunderbolt port, OS is Mavericks 10.9.2
2. Apple Thunderbolt display 27" identical to this : http://www.apple.com/displays/
3. A Samsung TV with RGB port, & HDMI port.
I want all these displays ( macbook, Apple thunderbolt display & the Samsung Tv) connected at the same time, I had a trial to connect them using a minidispaly adapter to RGB port & HDMI port in the TV but it didnt worked.
Please help!
Thank you.

The Thunderbolt dock adds extra ports:
HDMI (up to 2560x1600 with the Elgato, 1920 x 1200 with the CalDigit)
3 USB 3
Ethernet
Audio in
Audio out
You could also use a Belkin Thunderbolt dock.
<http://www.belkin.com/us/p/P-F4U055/>
It includes a FireWire port, but no HDMI port, so would need a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter (1920 x 1200 max) for the TV. This would use the second Thunderbolt port, so the Belkin dock has to be used with the port on the back of the Thunderbolt display, not between the computer and display.
If you don't need the extra ports, use a Thunderbolt hard drive (with two Thunderbolt ports)
<http://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/backup-plus-desk -mac-thunderbolt/>
This can be your Time Machine drive. Connect the Thunderbolt display to the computer, one port of the drive to the port on the back of the display, and a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter to the second Thunderbolt port on the drive.
You will have three displays with differing resolutions, so mirroring is not going to fill each screen at full resolution.

Macbook pro looses login settings with thunderbolt display

I've noticed that on occasion my MacBook Pro looses its desktop settings when connected to a Thunderbolt display. Why Thunderbolt display discards my MacBook Pro window environment settings upon boot-up is unknown to me. I can tell when this happens when my desktop loads different backgrounds from those on my MacBook Pro. Furthermore, the option in the System Preferences for changing my desktop background will cease to function. I even notice system wide speed degradation.
In order to correct this and reload my MacBook Pro settings I must identify a specific file named “com.apple.loginwindow.plist” and delete it. Doing so resolves whatever existing conflict so that Thunderbolt displays the correct background and enables System Preferrences to work properly.
I would appreciate very much if anyone has a resolution for this problem.
Respectfully,
TomBoltz

I think you need to do a search of the of these forums to see if there is an answer. I saw a lot of suggestions, but the #1 solution is buying a brand new cable. I have personal experience with that. My son recently switched from an HP to a MacBook Pro. The HDMI cable worked perfectly with the HP. It didn't with the Mac. He got a new cable for the Mac, everything resolved itself.
I have heard all kinds of speculation on it, but it happens frequently enough that there must be something going on. I'd spend $30 on a new MiniDisplayPort to DVI connector or whatever you use.

Daisy Chain a LED Cinema Display to a Thunderbolt Display

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