Crazy, confusing standards

I'm looking at upgrading my monitor. There are many types of connection standards for, er, connecting the monitor to a graphics cards: VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort.

VGA is practically dead; that leaves three different types of ports to worry about. What makes it worse is that DVI itself has four permutations!

So, when buying a monitor, one has to consider:

1. The monitor, of course.
2. The graphics card; it must possess the type of connection port suitable for the monitor.
3. The proper cable that can provide the resolution that's native to the monitor.

Mess up on any of the three, then the results are, shall we say, very vexing.

Comments

[Alex]

DVI and HDMI are interchangeable - most graphics cards come with adapters, and, in the rare case where they don't, you can buy one for $10 if you shop around.

Display port is a pain, but, again, they usually come with adapters. In the last year I took over IT upgrades for my workplace, which involved receiving a shipment of 30 workstations (which some non-techie ordered without consulting with me) and using them to replace our old computers. The onboard video output was display-port, but they all came with Display-Port-to-DVI adapters, AND they all had VGA on board as well. That worked out perfectly - we wanted dual-monitor setups, and all of the monitors have both a DVI and a VGA port, so I didn't have to spend extra money buying video cards.

Long story short, the different standards aren't really an issue. If you want audio and video over the same cable, go with pure HDMI. Otherwise, you're ok with any of the three digital standards.

[Isaac Schrödinger]

Yeah, upon reading more, I found out that HDMI is basically DVI + audio.

The monitor I'm looking at comes with the relevant cables. So, I don't have to worry about buying any.