I honestly thought I’d written everything I was going to on the Dell UP2414Q, but it would seem that it is the gift that keeps on giving. However, I’m still learning, and even now have something new to share.

• In common with many 1st generation “pro-sumer” 4K screens the UP2414Q is “dual-tile”. This means to achieve a picture of 3840 x 2160 pixels @60 Hz, you need to enable DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-stream transport (MST) on the monitor.
• MST sends two parallel streams to the screen which places them side by side. On earlier versions of the Intel HD4400 chipset driver, windows showed this as two discrete windows. This was less than ideal but still usable. Later versions of the Intel drivers (post June 2015) included a “fix” that allowed windows to treat both streams a single desktop. Obviously, this was a massive improvement.
• However, with DisplayPort 1.2 MST mode enabled, you “lose” one of 3 monitors supported by the Intel HD4400 (and most other Intel chipsets, from what I can tell). This means that with MST enabled, you can have 1 4K monitor running @60Hz, plus the attached laptop screen.
• If you want to add additional physical screens, you need a USB3 adaptor to act as a bridge; and at time of writing (Sept 2015) the best solutions are either/only 1440P @60Hz or 2160P (4k) @30Hz.
• If you disable DisplayPort 1.2 (and by extension MST), you can run a second external monitor. Theoretically this will give you 2x 2160P @30Hz. 4k @30Hz is probably OK for video playback, but for me was entirely pointless for desktop work.
• One of my biggest problems with my UP2414Q was it unexpectedly going into standby between 5-15 times a day. This happened seemingly at random, and the only fix was to “turn it of and back on again”. Sometimes it would come back immediately, but often it would take many attempts. There are various forums threads about this, but none of them are conclusive. I’d put it down to some outstanding compatibility issue and/or the limitations of the HD4400 card. My Intel HD5500-based HP Laptop never had the issue, but after plugging in a Dell E7450 (also HD5500 based) I was most concerned to see it happen immediately again. At that point I realised that the ONLY thing I’d not changed was the Dell DisplayPort cable that came in the box. As it was plugged into my docking station (which I have also changed), it never moved. The poxy “official, use only the original Dell cable” has caused me curse and shout 10 times a day for the past year. The £5 generic branded cable works fine. Looking around, it would appear that this is a known issue with some cables.

So final thought (for now!) The UP2414Q is a great monitor, and with the latest drivers it is even better, but chuck the cables in the bin.