Aww. You just unbox your brand new monitor, you pull it out and look at its premium glossy surface, you pull the power cable and then you get a cable like one of these...
What are all these cables?!
Most of you already know that these cables send video to your monitor, but we are going to explain them in-depth and show you each of their uses.
VGA (The Old Timer)
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| The Male VGA Connector Most of you 90's folk know about this cable as it was the standard connector back then. Even today it is still used by rougly a third of people today. It appeared in 1987 as a new video standard. Now many of you might be suprised to know vga's intended resolution was 640x480 (Lol i don't think your whole desktop is gonna fit there)! But thanks to new versions like SVGA and QXGA it has been extended to 2048x1536 (if you find an actual monitor that supports it!). It was actually made by IBM for their PS/2 line. It is actually an analog connector which separates it from the other 3. If you need a normal pc with a normal monitor, vga is a good choice. DVI (Newer but still a little old) |
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| Male DVI Connector Nothing much i can say here, it was made in 1999 just before windows xp was released 2 years after. It didn't make a big improvement since it only ramped the resolution to 2560x1600. A worthy difference is that it is the first one to use digital signals which gives it a more sharper image but the difference is so small that you wont notice a difference. However DVI has 6 CONNECTORS! You have DVI-I, DVI-D, which are either single or dual link and more commonly used, and also DVI-A and DVI-M1 DA which only have one link. Aim for a dual link if you want the max resolution but since today the standard is 1080p (atleast for me) a single link is sufficient. HDMI (Today's Modern Connector) |
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| HDMI Connector (DONT MIX IT WITH USB!) This nifty usb looking thing actually changed the way video works by supporting AUDIO SIGNALS! Which means all you need is 1 connector to connect a tv to your pc or STB. This one was a big improvement since older cables lose quality if the cables was longer, this has no loss and offers crisp image quality without any interference. It started to gain popularity in 2006 but it took a few years to become the proprietary cable for video and audio.it's also smaller and actually has a micro and mini hdmi version as you can see on the raspberry pi! |
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| Raspberry pi is a small computer the size of a credit card with the price of $20! |
Pretty much every monitor and graphics card has this port so if you are unsure which one to use this one is a good choice. Also i forgot to mention, this one has support for 4k resolution!
DisplayPort (A new one in the race)
This one isn't really that different as it only gives resolutions up to 8K. However it actually uses micro data packets instead of raw digital signal so you can fit more data with less pins. GPU's today have DisplayPort Ports but most people prefer HDMI. Not a big improvement but if you want it it isn't a bad choice.
Final Question: Which one to use?!
They are all good choices so i don't think it matters which one you choose, it's all preference. However besides resolution all of these connectors actually have different refresh rates.
For people that only use pc's for browsing or light gaming, VGA or DVI is a good choice. For gamers use HDMI or DisplayPort as it offers higher refresh rates which mean higher fps without input lag!
Image's downloaded from Pixabay
Documentation provided by Wikipedia, CNET and other sources
Written by Veljko Kovačević (a.k.a PC Phantom)
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