DVI-D, DVI-I, and Bios Flashing
I have had my 2 new Viewsonic VX2025wm monitors working nicely with my eVGA 7600GT video card. The 2 monitors where hocked up through the DVI connection, but little did I know about DVI connections and the problems with devices. It happened after I played some games over at my cousin’s house. While there I had to hook up my computer to an old samsung CRT. I had to go into Windows VGA mode that night to get that working. When I came home and hocked up my computer the next day I got one VX2025wm working through DVI and the other would not come up on the DVI connection.
I spent an hour and half just trying to figure out what was the issue, and finally just hooked it up through the VGA-DVI connector. Well tonight I decided to really try and understand what was going on. I started with figuring I could use a bios update on my shuttle. That took a lot longer than expected. I didn’t know there were so many versions of Award Flash Writer utility. Of course the award flash/phoenix software website doesn’t have any options download so you go searching for them on the web. It took 3 versions, 7.7, 8.08 and finally 8.60b to get it to recongnize the new bios bin file I had. (for kicks I ended up getting the 8.60b one from here). Couple that with doing it all from bootable CD-Roms I was down another 1 1/2 hours of my time.
The bios update did not help with my DVI issue, so I started googling. Man what did find! I always had a bad feeling about switching from my old high res CRTs to the LCD world, and I can see many more reasons why I should have held out a little longer. I came to understand DVI-I, DVI-D and DVI-A (basically the VGA-DVI connector). My eVGA card is a dual DVI-I, my monitors DVI-D or VGA and come with DVI-D and VGA cables.
There is a good link here discussing most all the DVI details and pictures of the different cables.
So my problem started with one of my monitors not being recongized as DVI-D, I can’t force it either because if the monitor has no signal you can not open the option menu. I started thinking it was my monitors or the cable. But after messing around turning the computer on/off with different combinations monitor and cables plugged in I had the opposite monitors. Recap, first I had monitor A working with DVI-D and monitor B working on through Analog-DVI connector. Then I had monitor B working on DVI-D and monitor A only through Analog-DVI. After reading all the information I could find, there is no real solution, just a bunch of common stories of the problem. One thing is for sure eVGA and ViewSonic monitors where named quite often. Maybe its just my bad luck, I always token to Samsung LCD monitors but ended up with ViewSonics for the price/feature and I have had eVGA cards in the past (but they are cheaper).
I sure don’t feel any better about the whole DVI situation. The crazy thing is that is where all the newer devices are going HDTV, Projectors, etc… whats up with all the issues between manufactors, not good.