1024 X 768 Widescreen Monitor

Flintstone

I have a combo 20" widescreen TV/Monitor connected to sattellite TV and to a GeForce2 GTS/64 Meg video card on a K7S5A Pro w/XP 1700+ and 512 Megs of ram. The question is about the video quality when using as a computer monitor. It only has a D-sub vga input, so DVI is out but the quality of the picture as a computer monitor sucks! Do you think that replacing the video card with something more up to date would help significantly? The quality of the picture when in TV mode is excellent and I'd kind of like the computer display to look better than crap!

Also, I've heard that nVidia cards do widescreen better than ATI cards. Is this true or just an urban legend?

Thanks for your help on this.

Flint

Straight_Man

Flintstone wrote:

I have a combo 20" widescreen TV/Monitor connected to sattellite TV and to a GeForce2 GTS/64 Meg video card on a K7S5A Pro w/XP 1700+ and 512 Megs of ram. The question is about the video quality when using as a computer monitor. It only has a D-sub vga input, so DVI is out but the quality of the picture as a computer monitor sucks! Do you think that replacing the video card with something more up to date would help significantly? The quality of the picture when in TV mode is excellent and I'd kind of like the computer display to look better than crap!

Also, I've heard that nVidia cards do widescreen better than ATI cards. Is this true or just an urban legend?

Thanks for your help on this.

Flint

Newer video cards of high quality will have modes for display that better suit your widescreen display-- yes, a better video card would help.

Second, think about and look up what video modes your widescreen likes. You want a mode closest in your wiceo card to the screen pixel or LCD cell ratio that is closest to the monitor's native mode, to see how the card actually can work. If you have to stretch the screen with the vertical and horizontal size a lot to make it fill the screen, than you will get a situation where the monitor has to fill in pixels, and quality will stink more and more as you stretch or shrink window to fill screen without making is disappear on edges.

You can force a video mode by right-clicking desktop, then clicking settings, then looking for an Adapter tab. Then you can choose to use a refresh rate that is close to what is in manual. That alone might help. Next, tell that dialog ok, get back to the main settings tab in display properites, and choose a size that corresponds to screen size ratio, as close as you can. see how much htat improves things before you decide you have to get a new card. It is possible you have amonitor that is wide screen but is not very dense for dots also, and in this case a new card will nto help a lot, but first see if you can get the display working with the existing card given the RAM size, and if not tell us what happened to display as you tried and what modes you tried, ok???

Reason for backing off, is first to see how well card can now sync to display, and what changes do what will help us help you figure out if you have a bad (lemon) widescreen or if it is mostly the card.

John D-- who will not be back for a while today, need to play with operating systems and get the P4 box folding again and that will be complex as I want Linux if can do so.

John D.

Flintstone

John, thanks.

I have already changed refresh rates, screen size and the like and it only gets worse. The monitor documentation states 1024X768 and that's what the adapter is set for. Nothing on the screen looks stretched or out of the ordinary, just that text looks blurry and undefined. Higher than 60 hertz refresh rates cause the screen to waiver, kind of like a flag in the breeze, if you know what I mean. I was just asking as I have 4 other monitors by the same manufacturer that are monitors only and look great. That's why I bought this one. It does dual duty in one small space.

Thanks for your help.

Flint