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I just spent 18 dollars on an HDMI cable.

Try going into safe mode, see if you get a picture then. It'll tell you that yes, there is a setting that should be changed if it puts a picture on the screen in safe mode. I'm agreeing with above, there is a resolution setting that either the TV or computer needs to be adjusted; and safe mode never hurt anything to just look.
 
The wackiness continues. I plugged an adaptor into the ETI slot, then put the regular VGA cable in it. This is feeding into the TV. I get no picture. The SVGA cable was five dollars more ontop of returning the HDMI.

I connect the TV to the regular VGA output and the cable goes into the TV's VGA input. Works fine. Then I hook up the monitor to the DVI adapted to VGA. No go.

WTH? Why doesn't the DVI section work? Is it an either or thing?

.... Oh and yesterday I was telling the Radioshack guy I wanted to buy the HDMI cable to learn 3DMAX. He said "Good luck with the modeling" when I'd initially purchased the cable. Jeez. Very funny.
 
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Adapters are funny things... one day they may work and another day they may not. I've seen that happen quite a few times. :) I don't know why this is but they're not always reliable.

VGA, however is VGA, and is quite reliable.
 
several things to check when looking at HDMI. (I'm a jack of trades installed and setup these when they first came out)

Direction, Some cables are direction sensitive they have big arrows on them these usually are the cheaper cables.
Full wired cables, just like with SCART you have Half and Full wired cables. (You can check this with a multi meter, Chinese made cables tend to show this disturbing anti-feature)
Resolution, TV's in general doesn't like anything outside their native resolution, some cheaper TV's do not properly send their preferred resolution over HDMI.
Shielded cable, I have yet to see a unshielded HDMI cable but I wouldn't count those out.

Don't use a DVI to HDMI for a TV it just doesn't give the desired result 9 out of 10 cases.

It is late i just had a 16 hour day and I've drank a little Chuck and Patcc know how this affects my thinking patterns in an interesting manner.
 
I have only once seen a computer that allows you to use onboard video at the same time as a video card upgrade, and that's a 2001 Dell Optiplex GX150.

The only way to find out is to go into the BIOS and tell it to use onboard video as the primary video adapter, if it works then yay if not you're using the onboard until you go back and tell it to use the other card.
 
facattack said:
LOLs. Is there away to connect the TV up to the RADEON card and the monitor up to the onboard computer output? Both are VGA.
Click to expand...

Another approach, if you're wanting to display the same thing on both the TV and the monitor, is to use a VGA Y cable. I bought one from MCM Electronics (http://www.mcmelectronics.com). Running 1280x720 works pretty good for watching Netflix movies on the TV. Of course I have a different TV, etc.
 
Never used a y-cable myself but won't that damper the signal or is that not really existent? Doing that on sound you have multiple devices pulling off the voltage or whatever which makes the more you connect the less the volume without an amp or something in the mix. (Y is fine usually, just when I was young I had split it 4 ways and found that obviously it wasn't quite what I was looking for).

Regarding the connection being there when the card boots up but not afterwards is usually that setting on whether or not to expand your video to the external monitor, etc. Could still be a resolution issue though. VGA on an LCD might be better but when friends and I would export video via s-video cable it was so grainy on text it was pretty much useless. That was even in a game, not using real sized reading fonts. It was funny, the picture was larger and fine for playing until there was anything to read then we'd both end up sitting on the couch and realized we were looking at the crisper picture on the laptop in the first place. Eventually we gave up like usual and just turned the TV off.

The problem on LCD TVs would be if it's not the native resolution I would also expect text to not be very readable.
 
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barythrin said:
Never used a y-cable myself but won't that damper the signal or is that not really existent? Doing that on sound you have multiple devices pulling off the voltage or whatever which makes the more you connect the less the volume without an amp or something in the mix. (Y is fine usually, just when I was young I had split it 4 ways and found that obviously it wasn't quite what I was looking for).
Click to expand...

That's certainly possible. In my case, I noticed the picture on the monitor was ever-so-slightly dimmer. I suppose it depends on the input impedance of the TV and monitor, and how much voltage drop they're causing.
 
tomasont said:
Running 1280x720 works pretty good for watching Netflix movies on the TV. Of course I have a different TV, etc.
Click to expand...

I was playing around with some different resolutions tonight, and figured out that 1280x768 works even better, at least with my TV.
 
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