cheap PC for dual link DVI monitor

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Gawd
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Aug 24, 2014
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Hey I have a friend that needs a new computer and wants to use his old Dell 30" monitor. My understanding is the only way to get 2560*1600 is with a DVI cable and a card that supports dual Link DVI.

What are his cheapest options new? He actually has some old low end card that will work but I'm afraid it won't fit in any cheapo Dell, that happened with his old computer.
He's willing to spend $800 but the cheaper the better, just needs decent 2d support. Doesn't need a keyboard or mouse and I know he's not interested in building his own.

Thanks in advance
 
AFAIK anything with a native DVI port should be able to run his old monitor; what you can't do is easily use something that only has HDMI/DP output. The required adapters are all really expensive and slightly flaky (or cheap but only work with the handful of -mostly "Korean" 1440p - monitors that could overclock a single lane of DVI to HDMI speeds). Unfortunately sales of the gen1 models weren't good enough to justify the additional R&D work needed to fix the problems with a new generation.

Right now it's only people trying to run VGA at very high resolutions/refresh rates that're up a creek due to the removal of native analog output. The next step in retiring legacy support will be to remove DVI entirely; when that happens in another year or three it'll be the end of the road for all those old DVI only displays.
 
I think I know exactly which monitor that is, and it's a beauty--3007wfp. The issue with this monitor is that it will only run 2560x1600 with a dual link dvi signal at that resolution. Otherwise, it's 1280x800.

In my case I wanted to connect a Wyse thin client that was supposed to support it directly via a displayport to dvi dual link cable. After buying almost 8 of these from different sources, none of them worked correctly with the dell--I had to get a special box at frys (forgot what it was called) that sent a true dual-link signal to the monitor from the displayport. And the resulting picture is well worth it.

But most any card going back a decade or so should have native dual link dvi built-in--just be sure to get the right cable--it will have all the pins without a gap in between making 2 different 'sets' of pins.
 
With newer cards (that don't support analog out) you need to make sure the cable is digital only, and you probably should even on a card that does do analog out. Using a DVI-I cable my NEC 3090 (same generation as Dells 3007) and whatever GPU I had at the time tried to default to the analog signal with predictably awful results.

#4 on the image below. [H]'s dark theme and the images transparency are making the text nearly unreadable. :(

DVI_Connector_Types.svg
 
Do you guys know, if I buy some cheap Dell premade can I slap a big video card in it? He's not going to know how to get a used PC, tbh I'm not sure I would either
 
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