Hey guys. I currently have an Asus hd5850. I want to be able to play some games on my bedroom television, but unfortunately it's a CRT set. The card has display port, hdmi, and dvi outputs. The latter of which I am using with my pc. Now I know I probably need a down convertor box, but these are pretty expensive and then i thought to my self "you know, my $300 video card can probably do this" Does the graphics card have this capability? To output in VGA through the remaining ports? And what would happen if my monitor is on at the same time? I imagine it will be a pain in the ass to switch resolutions back and forth and have all my desktop icons messed up among other things. What is probably the cheapest and easiest way to accomplish this? Also, is it possible to throw a coaxial cable into the mix? This is because the pc is pretty far from the tv and I also want to wire it along the walls to keep the cabling hidden and I just know that the cables I need won't come in that length (~20 ft) or will be very expensive. And it happens that I have a insanely long coaxial cable in the storage. Thanks and sorry if some of the terminology is incorrect.
You can get a HDMI-DVI adapter for the main display and use a DVI-VGA-adapter for the CRT-screen. No active adapters needed, both those are just wire and cost a couple of bucks. 20 ft cable though.. Ummm... Yeah.. I hope you don't need a high resolution for the CRT-screen? URLS in newegg: HDMI-DVI (you can also get a cable with HDMI in one end and DVI in other, may actually cost the same or less.. DVI-VGA-adapter (you also get these with all graphic cards so you probably have one already)
Perhaps I was wrong in my post. My television set only has composite inputs, I'm assuming I was wrong in thinking the signal is related to VGA. And yeah, I'm definitely not going to be using the TV to browse the web or any text related things. So as long as there's picture and its in color, I'm good.
I'm not 110% sure about this one, but I do think you can turn VGA into both composite and component video. Atleast there appear to be an awful lot of pictures of such passive adapter cables: The picture quality will be horrible with a 20 ft composite cable, though.
That won't work. A HDMI->DVI adapter will only adapt the digital signal, while a DVI->VGA adapter will only adapt the analog signal. The issue here is that DVI (or rather DVI-I) carries both signals, but those signals cannot be converted via a simple adapter. So, the only possible solution to this, aside from getting an active converter (very expensive), would be to take one of the DVI connectors (I believe both are DVI-I on the 5xxx series) and use a DVI->VGA adapter on it. However, that still requires the CRT tv to support VGA, which it probably doesn't. You're correct in saying that there are some adapters out there, which can adapt VGA into composite and/or component video, but I've never seen one myself, so I've no idea how well they do the job. If anything, component would be preferable because image quality for composite is just plain bad. Even at low resolutions.
Nono you got it all wrong. I meant he swaps his existing (digital) screen from DVI-I to HDMI, thus freeing the DVI-I-connector. Now this connector also packs the analog video, which can then be output to the TV. And I'm positive that VGA-cable packs component video, and so does SCART, but if his TV only has composite input, then I'm not sure how to get it working. This is where those VGA-composite-adapters come in, but I have no personal experience of those and can't really tell if they work.. They do apparently exist, though. EDIT: come to think of it, I guess DVI-A only has the RGB-component video, so no composite there. Again, not sure.
Don't TV's elsewhere have SCART-connectors? That would make everything awfully simple. I know he said composite only, but that sounds so strange...
SCART is a European invention. I've no idea, how widespread its adoption is, but I'd wager that it never made it to the US.
Hey, thanks for the responses guys. Very good info. However, I just remembered I have a spare HD 4350. Now this card has an s-video out. So I did some research and it turns out you can run 2 different video cards. What I don't understand is, will both cards be in use all the time? or will one card remain idle when it's respective display is turned off? Or will the second card just create a dual monitor setup?
As Jipa says, a dual monitor setup. With all that that entails. Meaning that whatever image your HD5850 will render the HD4350 will know nothing about.
Yeah I did this, it just comes up in windoze with whatever displays you have attached. I had a 4870 and a 7300 in my comp at the same time, had to take the 7300 out though because it was causing crazy driver issues, making my computer crash etc You might be ok because they're both ati.
