My Avocent SwitchView died on me last week. Two of the four ports would fail to work. It was a decent enough KVM but you couldn’t do hotkey switching nor did it support audio. And it always was a little flaky.
I’ve never really had a KVM that I loved. It took years to support all the extra buttons on IntelliMouse. And then it took forever to get USB switching to work. They were always bulky, had an extra power brick, made a loud beep when you switched, etc.
I spent a couple days trying to work with just a software KM (keyboard/mouse - no video). I used Synergy which works amazingly well. It is the perfect solution if you have a monitor for all of your machines. Well, I have 4 or 5 computers I want to run plus a laptop. At least two of the machines are full time servers so I only need video when I’m doing heavy reconfiguration. The other three and the laptop are workstations. So as much as I like synergy, I needed a new hardware KVM.
I wanted to go with a DVI KVM to work with my Apple 23″ display. However, it is hard to find DVI support and it costs at least twice as much. I run two displays - the Apple 23″ HD Cinema and a Dell 17″ VGA/DVI. So VGA is an option. I went into Fry’s today to see what was available. After searching through the chaos that seems to define Fry’s, I finally found the KVM’s. They carried IOGear and Belkin. There were some knockoff brands as well but I didn’t want to go that route. I wanted to checkout the Belkin Flip for Mini. It looked like a good potential option. Fry’s didn’t have it. But they did have what looked to be almost the same exact thing from IOGear. It has the much less sexy name of MiniView USB KVM GCS634U. I had a couple IOGear KVM’s in the past but my experience with them wasn’t stellar. However, the IOGear here was the best option and I wanted to get my machines back up and running. So I took the chance on the IOGear hoping I wouldn’t have to endure Fry’s return line next weekend
Surprise! It works really well. Best KVM I’ve ever owned. The only thing bad - it doesn’t support DVI. That’s it. Everything else is fantastic. It is shaped just like a Mac Mini. The detailing on it is a perfect match for the mini. It has two built-in cables and two detachable cables - all proprietary at the KVM side but breakout into VGA/USB/Audio on the other side. I was very impressed with the build quality.
So why is this thing so good? First, it works. I can’t stress how rare that seems to be for KVM’s. It worked nearly flawlessly on all my machines. I have two PowerMac G5’s (2.7 and 2.0), a PowerMac G4 Cube, and a Dell PowerEdge 400SC hooked up to it. All work perfectly. The killer feature to me is that all my extended keys on my Mac keyboard (volume, eject) work for all machines - even in Windows on the Dell. It supports a wide range of hotkey options like switching just the video or just the audio. It has configurable hotkeys and has strong auto-detection for supporting PC’s and Mac’s properly.
I did hit one problem but I think this was more my fault than the device’s. I was using a bluetooth keyboard on my G5 2.7. I initially had it on and hooked up the KVM cable to my USB hub on the 2.7. My USB keyboard wouldn’t work. I finally turned off the bluetooth keyboard and connected the KVM directly to the Mac. Now everything works perfect (note to Apple - put more USB ports on the back of the PowerMac!).
At $129, it is not the cheapest solution but it is over $100 less than a DVI solution. The Belkin device is cheaper but limited to just two computers. I highly recommend the IOGear as an excellent cross-platform KVM.
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