I have a EVGA GeForce GTX460 video board (thanks to the suggestions of others here) that has 1 HMDI port and 2 DVI. I have two ASUS VH238H monitors that each have these connectors:
[ul]
[li]AC-IN (power)
[/li][li]HDMI-IN
[/li][li]DVI
[/li][li]VGA
[/li][li]Line in
[/li][li]Earphone out
[/li][li]SPDIF out
[/li][/ul]
[list=A]
[li]What are my options for connecting these two monitors to this video card?
[/li][li]If I do have multiple connection options, which is best and why?
[/li][li]I’m new to HDMI ports, so what should I do about sound and my video board and monitor? I was previously using the motherboards onboard sound chip through some external speakers that I’m happy with.
[/li][li]I have no clue about sound and HDMI. Do video boards with with HDMI out act as a fully functional sound board now?
[/li][li]Is HDMI sound only for HD media??? :)
[/li][/list]
DVI to each should be fine. HDMI in place of either if you don’t have two DVI cables is probably fine too.
You’d only need the HDMI if the monitor is using built in speakers - and you can get internal pass through cables that pass sound card audio to a video card to send it through the same HDMI cable, assuming all hardware involved supports it.
Personally I’d go DVI to each monitor though, for simplicity.
A. Best would be to use HDMI on whichever one you want to consider your ‘primary’ monitor, and DVI for the second one.
B. You could use DVI for both of them, the resulting picture would be the same, but you’d probably lose the option of playing things like Blu-Ray discs (by official means, anyway), which require HDMI’s copy protection. You could also split VGA off of the DVI ports, but the picture would be worse.
C-E. Unless you feel like routing the HDMI connection through a receiver setup, you’re probably best off just ignoring HDMI’s sound capabilities and using whatever on-motherboard sound capabilities there are. HDMI outputs on video cards can usually carry sound, but it’s often a hassle without a full home theatre setup.
HDCP is not HDMI specific, it can be supported over DVI if your videocard and monitor support it. Support for it over DVI is pretty common these days.
Google suggests both his videocard and monitor support HDCP over DVI.
I’d use DVI on both monitors and avoid HDMI if possible. I’ve found Nvidia drivers often try to be too smart for their own good when you use HDMI ports. You can usually work around the stupidity they introduce but DVI “Just Works” a lot more often.
Oh right, duh, I keep forgetting that since I couldn’t do it over DVI myself, but that was due to the monitor. Shouldn’t be a problem on newer monitors like his.
