What is the maximum amount of monitors a M4600 can use, using a docking station PR02x?

What is the maximum amount of monitors a M4600 can use, using a docking station PR02x.
This has 2 DVI, 2 DP, 1 VGA.

GPU could either be Quadro 2000m or AMD 5100. Does the number of useable monitors differ?

 

IIRC...

AMD: Five monitors total, three must be DisplayPort (two on dock, one on system), plus the internal and VGA
NVIDIA, Optimus on: Four monitors total, two must be internal and VGA, the other two can be whatever you want (DVI or DisplayPort)
NVIDIA, Optimus off: Two monitors total, any configuration

Note, the DVI and DisplayPort connectors on the dock are linked into "video 1" and "video 2". You can't use all of the ports, only one from each group. The dock basically has an internal DisplayPort to DVI adapter with the port exposed for convenience.

 

Thank you

Is this M4600 then different to a M4700 with NVidia Optimus off?
I remember having a M4700 with 1000m and 4 monitors including the laptop monitor.

 

Correct, starting with the M4700/M6700 generation, the NVIDIA GPU supports four outputs instead of two. This is when NVIDIA Kepler GPUs were introduced.
With the M4600/M6600, the NVIDIA Fermi GPU can only have two outputs, the other two in an Optimus configuration come from the Intel GPU (internal+VGA).

 

This difference is then dependent on the Laptops Optimus?
A M4700 K1000M can be put into a M4600 but still won't have 4 monitors with Optimus off?

 

Not sure on that one. The K1000M may be capable of four-monitor output, but the motherboard may not be set up to handle wiring all of those connections coming off of the GPU to the output ports, since it is not "supposed" to be possible with NVIDIA GPUs in this system. (You would think that it would since it works with AMD cards, but there are a lot of peculiarities with MXM GPUs, it might not be set up the same way...)

NVIDIA's Fermi laptop GPUs did not support more than two display outputs, which is why Optimus is needed to get more than two in this system with an NVIDIA GPU. It's not just on the Optimus implementation, it's a hard limit in the NVIDIA GPUs of the time.