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Canada, Ottawa
1 Level
689 Review
47 Karma

Review on Efficient IOGEAR 16-Port USB PS/2 Combo KVM Switch GCS1716: Simplify Your Workspace by James Weber

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Bad video ghosting, mouse dropped randomly

This is the 5th or 6th IOGEAR KVM I have owned and I have always been very happy with it in the past. With PS/2 keyboards getting harder and harder to find, I decided it was time to replace my IOGEAR GCS138KIT (PS/2 8-port KVM) with this one. The first problem was that the mouse didn't work. I fixed it by disconnecting and reconnecting the mouse from KVM and figured it wasn't anything to worry about. Then came the video quality. At first glance everything looked fine. Then I opened a terminal window and noticed that the ghosting was very bad when the background was dark or black. I've experimented with some cables, even changing the cable to the monitor, but it made no difference. During my testing, the mouse randomly stopped working and I had to unplug it from the KVM and plug it back in. I've replaced my Logitech MX310 wired USB mouse with a generic USB optical mouse, restarted the KVM a few times, shut down the KVM and plugged it back in, but the problem persisted. Due to the video quality and the mouse disappearing issue, I have decided to give KVM back and go back to my PS/2 KVM until another alternative is found. Especially with higher resolutions, ghosting occurs again and again when using KVM. That's the price you pay for the convenience of KVM. However, this was totally unacceptable in my opinion as I mainly work with white on black connections and the ghosting was much more pronounced with light on dark images. Again, I have had many IOGEAR products and have always been happy with them. you so far. This experience won't make me mad at IOGEAR, but I was far from satisfied with this item.

Pros
  • The custom ASIC provides an auto-detect feature that detects the position of each station in the setup. iogears with 3 years free lifetime technical support
Cons
  • New Competitors