DVI Cable Questions.

[Comedian]

First of all, I have the BFG Geforce 7800 GT. Ok, now the outputs on the back look like Dual Link DVI-I connector. Is it a true Dual-Link plug? What does Dual Link really do? If I wanted to go DVI to HDMI, could i use a dual link DVI-D to hdmi cable or would I need something else? Some of this stuff is still pretty confusing to me.

 

[artmonkey]

As far as I can tell from their website this graphics card is not dual-link DVI. Weather you need a dual link DVI depends on what kind of display you want to run. A single link DVI will power a monitor/TV up to 1920x1200@60Hz (32bit colour / 8bit per channel).

The two reasons you would need a dual link is:

1. Higher resolutions (than above) or more recently
2. Higher bit-depth colour

As far as the Dual link DVI-D to HDMI connection goes; The cable will fit you card but I think your card would not support it. The only benefit for using such a cable would be to take advantage of the higher bit-depth colour supported with HDMI 1.3 but very few HDTV's/projectors support this and even fewer graphics cards (ATI Fire GL is the only one I know of).