Studio Display on a Windows PC

I have a dual monitor desk setup — one Apple Studio Display and one ASUS 144hz gaming monitor. For the past few months, I've just been turning my head to use my Windows 11 desktop for flight sim. Unfortunately this is not ideal for a few reasons:

My second monitor is smaller
My second monitor is 1080p
My second monitor is offset to the right, so I have to turn my head.

So, I had a crazy idea. What if I could use my Apple Studio Display with my Windows PC? Then I would be able to switch back and forth between my MacBook and desktop seamlessly by switching out one cable to the Studio Display. Oh, if it were only that easy. This article should serve as a guide to anyone wishing to attempt the same thing.

Fair warning: Your mileage may vary. I was about ready to return the cable to wherever it came from and admit defeat.

Prerequisites:

Belkin Charge and Sync Cable for HUAWEI VR Glass
Apple Studio Display
A strong will

Ordering the cable

This is the easiest part of the whole process. Head to eBay and search for a "Belkin Charge and Sync Cable for HUAWEI VR Glass". Find one that is priced decently (under $130 as of the writing of this article). Order it. Wait 3+ weeks for it to come via some carrier you've never heard of before.

Plug it in and it works

Yeah, I thought so too... not so easy. Where to begin? When I plugged the display in originally, it was "recognized" in Windows, but the display was flashing black on and off repeatedly. Not a good sign. So, I started troubleshooting. I knew you needed Boot Camp drivers to control the display, but maybe those would have some effect on getting an output?

Brigadier

Brigadier is a nifty tool for installing Boot Camp drivers on non-hackintosh Windows computers. These drivers will allow you to control your display's brightness from Windows. You can download it from here. Once you've got it downloaded, open up a terminal and cd into the directory where the .exe ended up. Follow these steps:

Run brigadier.exe --m MacPro7,1 — this will download the Boot Camp installer and drivers from Apple
cd into $WINPEDriver$ and delete all but the following:

Dolby
AppleAudio
AppleAudio_1883106B
ApleSSD64
AppleUSBVHCI
SerialIO

This will prevent Boot Camp from doing unnecessary work.

cd into BootCamp\Drivers — delete everything except the Apple and Promise directories
Here comes the fun part... cd in to BootCamp\Drivers\Apple\BootCamp.msi. If you can right click and run the msi as an administrator, go right ahead. Unfortunately in Windows 11, this wasn't so easy.

Registry Hacking

Editing the registry in Windows is always a bit nerve racking. This one is quite simple. I'll save myself the embarrassment of pretending to know exactly what this edit does to Windows — it adds a "Run as Administrator" option when right-clicking on .msi files. However, there is a deeper technical explanation. I'm a Windows guy, but I don't know the specific inner workings of the registry. If you're interested in that, here's GPT-4's attempt:

GPT-4's attempt to explain the `MSI.Package` registry entry.

You'll need to add a registry entry called runasuser under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Msi.Package\shell. Right click on the shell folder, and click "New > Key". Enter runas when prompted. Under the shell\runas folder, double click in the right pane on "(Default)". Inside the value, type Run as &administrator. Right click on the runas folder. Again, select "New > Key". When prompted, enter command as the value. Double click on "(Default)" on the right side under command. In the popup, type msiexec /i "%1".

Below is a picture of how your directory structure should look when complete.

Once done, you can go back to the BootCamp.msi file and right click, and select "Run as Administrator". Follow the installer's instructions, and then reboot.

Drivers and Firmware

Unfortunately this was not the end of the road for me. At this point, I was concerned that my 1080Ti was incapable of driving the Studio Display due to DisplayPort compatibility issues. I was half right — my graphics card needed a firmware update. After searching around, I found this firmware from Nvidia. I installed this, and restarted my computer. Still a flashing black screen...

Nvidia Control Panel

After some thought, I realized that maybe I could tweak some settings in Nvidia Control Panel. This was the key:

Enabling the Studio Display
Lowering the resolution to 3840x2160

For some odd reason, I had to click a tick box to enable output to the Studio Display. I've never seen this before in Windows or Nvidia Control Panel in 10 years of owning Windows computers, but who knows. You may encounter the same thing.

Next, I lowered the resolution for the display to 1920x1080. Voila! It worked! I was shocked. Next, I started stepping the resolution up one by one, seeing if I could get the display to exhibit the behavior it had before. It worked great, until I made it up to 5K, and ultimately had to settle for 4K. My hunch is that either the Belkin cable OR my 1080Ti just don't have the bandwidth, but I'm not 100% sure. We'll find out when I eventually upgrade to the 40 series.

Recap

I'm glad I got the display working in Windows — I've hated not having the same setup for my PC as I do for my MacBook. It actually works quite well — the speakers work, the camera and microphone work, the USB ports work. The only thing I am missing is the 5K resolution, but I'm not too upset. It was somewhat a pain in the ass, but totally worth it. That said, I definitely had some help. Below are resources that I used along my way:

Just another disclaimer: your mileage may vary... even in guides that I read using the exact same cable and display as me had different outcomes. I hope this guide provides some hope for others trying to do the same. Good luck.