How to Connect a PC to a HDTV

How to connect a PC to an HDTV

Except for the early days of home computing, PC’s and TV’s have had separate lives. The picture quality and size of a PC monitor made it a better option than a TV for PC users. Now, with the advent of HDTV and the PC Media Center, connecting a PC to a TV again makes sense. The reasons include:

Many HD capable TV’s do not have a tuner and must rely on an outside source for a digital signal, such as a HDTV PC tuner.
The quality of an HDTV display is much improved over the old analog TV’s, with many as good or better than PC monitors.
With the advances in graphics cards including the addition of the DVI (and recently HDMI) interface, a PC can now supply a digital signal to a HDTV.
HDTV’s are larger, better to display pictures and videos stored on the PC.

A PC to HDTV connection is made via the video/graphics card and is usually thru one of three different interfaces: DVI, VGA or component (via a dongle cable).

Recently, the HDMI capable graphics card was introduced giving yet another option for connecting to a HDTV. The component and VGA connections are actually analog based, with the digital source being translated to analog by the PC graphics card then back to digital by the HDTV. The other two sources are digital, with DVI carrying only digital video and the HDMI carrying both digital video and audio. Older HDTV’s may have only component (also known as YpbPr).

With newer HDTV’s adding DVI and/or HDMI, most LCD HDTV’s also have a VGA connection.

Which interface is better? The digital DVI & HDMI interfaces will give a better quality picture, but it’s hardly noticeable to the eye except on very large displays (50” and over). VGA also gives a very high quality picture.

Graphics cards for PC’s come in two interface types, AGP and PCI-express, with the PCI-express being the new standard. Hopefully your PC has one or the other. However, many of the cheaper PC’s are sold without a graphics slot to keep costs down. They use the lower performance motherboard graphics which is not acceptable for HDTV. See the graphics page for more information on connecting these PC's to a HDTV.

An AGP slot looks like this:

A PCI-express slot looks like this:

The cost for a quality graphics card has been getting lower, but is still around $100. At a minimum it should have at least 128MB of DDR memory and be capable of running DirectX 9.0 (go here here for more on DirectX). For more information on graphics cards and card suggestions go here.