Notes on a Gateway 21" Widescreen Monitor

[Soopafresh]

Got a FPD2185W Flatscreen LCD last week and wanted to mention a few things I learned in the process of setting it up.

1) You NEED a video card with a DVI connection on it to drive the monitor to the 1680x1050 resolution. VGA ain't gonna cut it. I have an NVIDIA 6200 with 128MB.

2) The monitor doesn't come with a DVI cable, so remember to get one ($20).

3) The Nvidia 77.x series drivers DO NOT work with the monitor, and it took me a day of troubleshooting to figure out why clicking on a video file resulted in 100% cpu utilization and eventual system hang. I had read too many stories of user woes with the 80x series of drivers, so I tried everything else to get the system to work - Direct X upgrades, codec swaps, etc. Upgraded to 81.95 and voila ! Workee workee.

4) While it doesn't take much CPU to bring up the Windows desktop on the monitor, It takes a LOT of CPU power to display a video at full screen. I have mpeg playback capabilities on my HD capture card, but I prefer the image the regular 6200 video card renders. Still, my P4 2.4 533FSB is struggling on HD content to the screen.

5) Nvidia have their $20 PureVideo drivers which are supposed to render smoother playback on HD, but they require the WM9 player installed, which I don't want to do (especially with all the DRM additions), but it might do the trick. Anyone ?

6) Finally, the image is pretty glorious. Plenty of room and real estate. Video looks amazing. There were 0 dead pixels on the display. None of the problems I faced had anything directly to do with the monitor.

[Faustus]

Interesting stuff. Pay drivers though? Thats lame.

[studtrooper]

Heh, HD content actually does that to everyone's computer. If you do not have your graphic cards' GPU handle the decoding, you will almost always see 100% CPU utilization on ANY monitor you use. nVidia PureVideo will take the load off for any .TS (Mpeg2 transport stream) HD movies you have (yes, WMP9/10 is required, but its not like you can hide from DRM forever... besides, there are ways to get around DRM encoded files anyway) and for WMV HD files, you'll need to download the latest WMP updates for it to utilize hardware accelleration.