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Using Apple's 23" HD Cinema Display on PCs? 40

Posted by Cliff from the apple-does-makes-better-displays-don't-they dept.
rsilverman asks: "I recently bought the 23" Apple Cinema Display, which I am using on my TiBook, and I'm loving it! Now, I would like to also connect it to my Intel box running Win2k (perhaps ultimately using a digital video switch box). I thought this might be relatively simple -- I went out and bought an AGP video card with the same chip set as is in some Macs, the nVidia GeForce Ti, and it listed the monitor's highest resolution as supported. No go. Tried the Radeon 7500 -- also no go. The monitor backlight powers up, but no picture. Then I read some more, and judging from what I was able to find (and don't really understand), the monitor's resolution (1920x1200) is near the edge of what can be done using the DVI standard. Does anyone out there know more about this? Got it working?"

"Cards tend to support that resolution and higher only with analog signalling, not digital. I've seen claims that it can be supported using some kind of non-standard timing ('pushing data during the blanking interval'), which I assume is a driver issue. Then there's 'dual-link DVI' -- using two of the usual DVI data links in parallel (still over a single connector, just using more pins). The Apple specs do not mention whether the monitor is single- or dual-link. At the moment, my best bet appears to be the 3DLabs Wildcat VP or III cards (one of which supports dual-link). However, they're very expensive, and I'm still not sure it will work."
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Using Apple's 23" HD Cinema Display on PCs? More

Using Apple's 23" HD Cinema Display on PCs?

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  • I think you are looking for (Score:5, Informative)

    by medcalf ( 68293 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @03:51PM (#4143405) Homepage
    this [drbott.com]

  • DVI big flat panel is tricky (Score:3, Informative)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @04:05PM (#4143503) Homepage Journal

    I use an nVidia Quadro4 900XGL to drive a Samsumg T240 (24" HDTV display) [edgereview.com] under Red Hat 7.2, but with the nVidia kernel drivers.

    When we were researching this, it was important to find out whether the DVI interface on the graphics card was really capable of driving 1920x1200 digitally and not just through its analog connectors (DVI-I means integrated DVI-D and DVI-A (analog)), since many smart displays will just fall back onto the analog signal if the digital signal is not there.

    IIRC, the fundamental issue was how good the TMDS transmitter was on the video card. It seemed like, very roughly, RAMDAC frequency: analog picture quality, TMDS frequency: digital picture quality. Many topped out at 1280x1024, some were good for 1600x1200, but you had to look very carefully for one capable of 1920x1200. Eg, there were some medical quality image viewing hardware that were quite expensive.

    The situation has probably improved over the last 6 months, so you shouldn't have quite so hard a time finding a good video card.

    • Out of interest (but possibly off-topic) do you know of anywhere that has a survey of what different chipsets and different monitors are capable of?

      For my current computer I purchased a CTX PV880C which was spec'ed to do 1280x1024 at 75Hz (and has a DVI-digital input, unlike many other cheap panels...), and a Matrox G550 to drive it (it was the cheapest card I could find that advertised Linux drivers and DVI digital output), but was initally surprised that if I run it at much more than 60Hz then I get interference / noise appearing on the screen (but not in analogue mode).
      Not that I'm complaining much - I'd have thought that on an LCD anything above cinama-film rate (around 24Hz?) would be sufficient.
  • You need a DVI to ADC converter to use the display. The graphics cards shipped with the new G4s come with both DVI and ADC (dual head card), and inorder to run a cinema display off of the DVI port, you need an adapter [apple.com]

  • nVidia gForce 4 Ti is working for me (Score:3, Informative)

    by ceej ( 185138 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @04:38PM (#4143750) Homepage
    I'm sharing an HD Cinema Display with my G4 and my PC. I bought one of the Apple dvi -> ADC converters, which I assume you're using with your TiBook to drive the display. My PC has a gForce4Ti 4600 card in it, which worked just fine with no fiddling right out of the box. (I upgraded from a gForce2 that had no dvi out.) Now I just need a dvi switcher [gefen.com] and I'll be living in luxury.
    • How... puzzling. The very first card I tried was just that: an nVidia
      GeForce Ti 4600. It didn't work at all -- the monitor powered up, blinked
      a cursor once, then nothing at all during the PC's power-up sequence. I
      fiddled with various BIOS settings, all to no avail. It would drive a
      standard monitor off the VGA port, but no joy from the DVI port.

      But, nVidia doesn't make their own cards, right? They sell the chips to
      card makers. So perhaps it's some card difference -- exactly what brand
      of card are you using?

      Thanks, - Richard

      • The card is a PNY, a brand I wouldn't exactly recommend. (My husband bought one at the same time, but his identical box contained a GF3 card. He returned it and got a non-functional GF4. Third box worked.) I am running the nVidia Detonator drivers, which I would recommend. Did you try only the drivers that came with your card? That might have been the key.
      • I can confirm that the GeForce4 Ti will drive Apple's Cinema HD. I'm currently using one of these with a Gainward 4200 via Apple's ADC->DVI converter. I have heard that GeForce3's have an integrated TMDS chip that can't cut it while the GeForce4 Ti uses a chip from Silicon Image. I don't think this monitor uses dual link DVI. IIRC the single link DVI spec officially maxes out at 1280x1024 digitally, but the large LCD's by Apple and Samsung can go beyond this because there is no need for the blanking intervals when driving an LCD digitally. So the bandwidth is there. You just need to cut out the fat. Here [edgereview.com] is a great discussion of the whole topic.

        I would hazzard a guess that W2K is doing something at boot that is standing in your way since it was pretty straightforward to get this up and running under X and the VESA framebuffer (sure ain't matroxfb though). The monitor will even respond to standard VGA modes as I have access to the bios, etc... If you're losing the screen after the bios hands off to W2K then your card should work with some configuration. The alternate case frankly stumps me unless you have a 3rd party ADC-DVI adapter, though even that possibility is confusing as ADC really is just DVI + USB + power. The pins for each protocol are right there.

        There is one hitch to using any Apple monitor (excepting the 22" Cinema Display?) on a non-apple box. You lose control of the backlight so this gorgeous monitor can't be adjusted for brightness and seems to default to 100% on (which is too bright to make true black). I think this is done over VESA's DDC lines and have looked through the PPC Linux kernel sources for a way to do this on i386 but the meat of the matter may be buried in an Apple rom either on the motherboard or the video card. The only tweaking utility I could find on FreshMeat was something called read-edid that can find the monitor's identity but then barfs. Does anyone out there have any code that we could play around with on this subject?

        • It's encouraging that you both got this to work with this (relatively
          inexpensive) card; however, I'm puzzled why I didn't work for me. As I
          said, I did try the Xtasy nVidia GeForce4 Ti. I got no picture at all,
          ever -- just single glimpse of a blinking cursor at power-on, which
          immediately disappeared, then a blank screen. I also got this response
          from VisionTek support (the card maker):

          GeForce4 Ti4600 which used on Apple computers has different design then
          Ti4600 for PCs. For PC, the maximum supported resolution for DVI is
          1280x1024.
          ... but since you are both claiming it works, I suppose I will discount
          this. Are you using AGP or PCI?

          I know about the monitor control issue, but since I have a Mac connected
          also, this isn't a problem...

    • Success!

      To make a long story short -- I had to upgrade the BIOS. After that, the
      nVidia board worked perfectly.

      Thanks for all the input; without the assurance that these cards did
      actually work in this setup, I would not have gone back and done the extra
      testing/searching that turned up the solution.

  • Delicious (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @05:28PM (#4144116)
    I'm probably not adding too much to the conversation, but I'll have to tell you, getting a computer to work on a HDTV monitor at high resolutions really is a nice luxury.

    My Sun workstation in the office, has a 24" HDTV screen. It is a good 'ole CRT with an analog input. 1920x1200 resolution. Lots of real estate for opening up lots of windows. It really is a nice perk, so I don't blame you one bit for trying to get this to work!

    Although, to be honest, I haven't done very much in the way of digital video playback on it, so I really don't know what I am (or am not) missing by an LCD screen with DVI. Maybe it is time I take that television screen home and seeing what a PC can do with it.

    On a related note... anyone know how to hook up a mid-priced DVD player to an analog or DVI HDTV aspect ratio computer monitor? I'm wondering just how crisp it can be.

    • Re:Delicious (Score:3, Interesting)

      by adolf ( 21054 )
      Forget plugging in a DVD player to a computer monitor.

      Anything "mid-priced" will output some form of NTSC video, which is horrible in all incarnations. Even if you get -really lucky- and score a VGA-esque RGB output, you'll be ill-equipped to see "just how crisp it can be," because the DACs on your Sun's video hardware are significantly better than anything inside of a sanely-priced DVD player.

      Better to pick up a DVD drive, and some good software. This is, after all, a computer monitor. Drive it with a computer. At 1920x1200.

      You'll get, depending on hardware and software, some very fine scaling and framerate conversion and filtering. Things will be great, as good as it gets. If your Sun can't do it, a cheap PC with an appropriate DVD-supporting video card will still be cheaper than a super-high-res progressive scan DVD player.

      Whereas, a DVD player will only drive the monitor at a couple of fixed frequencies and resolutions, which may or may not include overscan support, and thus show a chance of being incredibly poor-looking on a computer display - and that's only if you get the interfaces to talk to eachother at all.

      That all said, if you're insistant, this box [extron.com] will do what you want with just about any analog signal you can come up with. And since noone seems to want to make an analog -> DVI converter, things get even more hairy. Something like this this adapter card [extron.com] along with this way-overkill video switcher [extron.com] might do it.

      You don't want to ask what any of that stuff costs, though. There's reasons why the price isn't listed on the web page. (other stuff probably exists which does similar things with varying amounts of overkill, but Extron has a reputation for being the best. If you wanna see "just how crisp it can be" in such an arrangement, look no further.)
    • As mentioned by adolf, the RGB hardware in a mid range DVD player isn't exactly a chocolate muffin.

      An S-video output will be far crisper in this setup, since although RGB is the better format on paper, the nature of the original signal (the data coming off the DVD) and the way the RGB and s-video signals are made up will give s-video the edge.

      A DVD uses component video, made up of luminance, and two colour difference signals, plus sync (sometimes).

      To get from component to s-video, you don't need to do anything to the luminance signal, all you have to do is combine the chominance channels and sort out some timing.

      To convert to RGB, you have to do some serious work.

      In that price range, s-video wins every time, especially when converting from component sources.

      To make it into a digital signal... Well, it's been discussed. Only for the hobbiest with a shedload of cash. Doing it with a computer and a decent hardware decoder is the way to do it if you want to go down that road.

  • DVI-ADC (Score:3, Informative)

    by amokk ( 465630 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @05:43PM (#4144205)
    Do a little digging around and you'll find that various DVI connectors aren't compatible with each other.

    The Apple-made DVI to ADC converter will allow you to run your monitor on PCs...

    Here is a link to it on Apple's website [apple.com]. You can order the part from any Apple store. Most carry them in stock. This also will connect to your USB port to make the ports on the monitor function normally.

  • Try Gefen (Score:4, Informative)

    by wchin ( 6284 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @11:26PM (#4145922)

    I would give Gefen [gefen.com] a serious look. Their DVI to ADC Conversion Box [gefen.com] is the only one on the market that I know of that claims support for the 23" HD Cinema Display. Apple's, Dr. Bott's, and the Formac converter boxes all disclaim use with the 23" HD display. If nothing else, they should be able to help you with selecting the right graphics card.

  • Coming in late on this but... (Score:4, Informative)

    by aztektum ( 170569 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @12:16AM (#4146162)
    A friend of mine works for CompUSA and after noting an Alienware rig that was tested in Max PC a couple months ago running with a 23" Apple display, he said that Compusa actually carries converters for this. I haven't seen them myself, but I would think most of their stores would have them if ours does.

  • What do you think? (Score:4, Funny)

    by biglig2 ( 89374 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @04:38AM (#4147047) Homepage Journal
    I reckon if we tell him he needs the convertor about... say 5 more times ... his head will explode with frustration.

    Then we go to his house and steal the display.

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