What's the deal with my video card?

June 7, 2006 7:34 AM

What's the deal with my new video card, and it's propensity to hate DVI?

I bought a video card from LeadTek based on the nvidia 6600GT. It's a dual output card, which is why I bought it, not for it's 3d-gaming capabilities. It has one DVI output and one VGA output, with converters so you can use it as two DVI's or two VGAs.

Using a DVI cable with one monitor, I had terrible results. The picture was snowy, would go black on occaison, and would not go above 1280x1024 (the monitors can do 1650x1024 or what have you). Using the second connector with a vga-to-dvi connector and a dvi cable, I could not get it to recognize the second monitor.

If I switch the cables to VGA (using the DVI-to-VGA connector on one of them) I get excellent picture at full resolution on both monitors. I guess I should not complain because it works great, but what's the deal? Shouldn't DVI be more capable than VGA, since it's digital and not analog? Do my DVI cables suck? Or does the DVI capability of the card just suck?

The symptom I got when I switched to higher res, by the way, was all kinds of colored snow/noise on the upper third of the screen.

posted by RustyBrooks to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I thought the conversion only worked one way - i.e. you can't use a DVI monitor with a VGA connection in a graphics card. I had to buy a new graphics card to work with my new DVI monitor, having had similar results to you when trying to use the new monitor with my old (VGA-connection) graphics card.
posted by altolinguistic at 7:50 AM on June 7, 2006

I thought the conversion was one way also, but the card did come with a VGA-to-DVI adaptor. The guy at the store mumbled sometihng about VGA connectors having both the digital and the analog availabe at the connector but I'm not sure.
posted by RustyBrooks at 8:10 AM on June 7, 2006

VGA-to-DVI cable is simply going to put analog signal on the DVI. This won't be any better than a straight VGA connection and might be significantly worse if the adapter is not very well made. If the monitor's expecting a digital signal on the DVI then giving it the analog won't work anyway -- that's what happening to your second monitor, I'll wager. As for your first monitor, I think your DVI cable is just bad.
posted by kindall at 8:44 AM on June 7, 2006

XFX makes that card with dual DVI outputs. It's fairly cheap. You'll find as above that DVI to VGA, if needed, is a much better route the the opposite.
posted by kcm at 9:13 AM on June 7, 2006

The guy at the store mumbled sometihng about VGA connectors having both the digital and the analog availabe at the connector but I'm not sure.

The first rule of buying computer parts is: never trust the mumblings of the guy at the store.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:11 AM on June 7, 2006

DVI can mean more than one thing. The signal can be analog or digital. There are at least six different variants for the cables. If the guy at the store mumbled about a VGA connector pushing a digital signal, he was mistaken or lying.

Or, what kindall and b1tr0t said.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 10:52 AM on June 7, 2006