Monarchs Glen

Ok, so I recently purchased a 32" 1080i 120hz LED flat screen to use as my monitor for my comp. I'm running a two year old Gateway GT5620 with onboard graphics. OS is Vista home premium. The picture is great aside from a bit of aspect ratio issues I have. I'm used to a square display from my 19" Planar monitor, so I don't have quite the vertical display area I am used to. I can change the ratio of course and wind up with a similar square-ish display, but that seems to defeat the purpose of the bigger screen, then using only about half of the horizontal area.

Anyway, the picture is fantastic, but I can't help thinking it could be better if I throw a little more money at it.

Here are my questions then:

1. I can get a VGA to HDMI cable to replace the VGA to VGA I am using now. The only output from the comp is VGA. Will this make a significant improvement in picture quality?

2. The other option I have considered is to install a graphics card that supports 1080i and has the HDMI ports. I have an available PCI Express 16x2 slot for the card, but only a 300 watt power supply. I don't game on the comp to speak of, only surf the net and watch video, along with paperwork for work.
Would this option yield me a much better picture than what I have, and would I also have to change the power supply to accomplish it.

If I can achieve a FAR better picture then it might be worth it to me to go to the expense. I just don't want to throw good money after bad, so to speak. I've already added a 1TB drive to the comp plus a 180G and 350G USB hard drives, as well as a sound card. I imagine I am already taxing the power supply, but haven't had any issues...yet.

Thank you for any input you can provide.

The only thing i can contribute is to say that a vga to hdmi cable probably won't give you a real noticable difference in picture quality since the computer only has the vga outputs. I would say installing the graphics card with hdmi outputs will help but i can't really give you any advice on the power supply issue. That's beyond my expertise. Good luck though and i am jealous.

Okay, to add a few cents here:

First off, do not use the monitor in 1080i mode. You want to use it at the TV's native resolution which will probably be 1366x768 or somewhere near there. Interlacing (the i in 1080i) is horrible for viewing text. It gives the illusion of being higher resolution than it is, but really, you're still using fewer pixels than 720p mode (or the native resolution which is best).

A VGA to HDMI cable will NOT provide you with any benefits for picture quality except over long runs of cabling where the analog signal may be diminished/corrupted by the cabling. If you see shadowing on the screen or Red-Green-Blue color separation, you just need a new cable, as it's not providing the entire scan range.

Since you have Windows Vista, right click on the desktop and bring up your screen resolution panel. From there, you will see a drop down or slider list (can't remember which on Vista). Anyway, you don't want to choose the 720p or 1080i settings. Instead, find the ones around 1366x768 or 1280x720 and those will probably yield you the best picture quality. You should see no scaling artifacts (fuzzy words, stretched images, etc), and the entire screen should be used up.

PM me if you have further questions, as I don't check here often.

Thanks for the input guys. I don't have any stretching issues or anything like that unless I set the output resolution from the comp at one of those odd resolutions. The monitor automatically adjusts to what ever resolution it is fed. I think I am just being a tad greedy, wanting to improve on perfection.

Hi. I'm going to get an xbox 360 soon. My pc monitor(no hd tv) has both an hdmi input and vga input, so I'm wondering whether to get an hdmi cable or vga hd av cable. I'm looking to purchase the official hdmi cable but I'm not sure if the audio adapter is included(anyone can confirm this?) and third-party audio adapters are either hard to find or are of low quality. If without the audio adapter, I might as well get the vga hd av cable by microsoft. As for the vga cable, I read somewhere that it has problems with HDCP compliant display. Is this true? Which leads to my question, is it possible to hook up the xbox 360 to the monitor using HDMI cable for video and the red and white audio cables of the vga hd av cable for sound simultaneously(leaving the vga connector unplugged)? I already have a spare hdmi cable. Thanks. Sorry if this message is a little confusing.

all the newer xboxes should come with hdmi, so that should be easy enough to go with.

If you're buying an older model (refurb), you may run into some problems as they don't have hdmi.