Looking for a little help in purchasing a new monitor

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Nosferatu
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Looking for a little help in purchasing a new monitor

Post by Nosferatu »

I currently have an OLD venerable (well POS :mrgreen: ) 60Hz, no special sync technology 24 inch monitor.

I have always wanted to get something with either freesync or gsync.

I heard nvidia cards will actually do freesync now as well as their own gsync.

But I am afraid my knowledge of newer stuff like freesync and gsync is kind of lacking.

Here is my desk setup.

I have 2 referbed desktop computers (I did the work myself).

One has a GTX 1060 and the other has a GTX 1660.

These might not be good enough to play modern games but they work for some older games just fine.

I have these hooked through a TESmart HDMI KVM switch.
(That is important since its going to limit me to HDMI)

Is it even possible to get either sync technology to work in this setup?

I heard that gsync is display port only and I think at one point nvidias implementation of freesync
was also DP only, although I heard that that is no longer true and you can use a HDMI 2.1 port.

Some of the information on the net is quite confusing about what is compatible with what,
and I was wondering if someone here, might know of something that might work for my setup.
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Krom
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Re: Looking for a little help in purchasing a new monitor

Post by Krom »

No, it won't work. Nvidia can still only use gsync/freesync through displayport.

If you want to use gsync/freesync with a Nvidia GPU, you can only use displayport. Also it may not work through a KVM anyway even if you had a display port one.

VRR through HDMI will never be an option on any current or past generation Nvidia GPUs because it is not a required component of their HDMI versions. Eventually a future card may support it if and when a future HDMI version moves to require VESA Adaptive Sync support which should ultimately unify and replace G-Sync and FreeSync. But this will never happen on a 1060 or 1660 as they will remain on their existing HDMI version.
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Re: Looking for a little help in purchasing a new monitor

Post by Tunnelcat »

One warning. If you choose a new monitor and want to use DisplayPort, turn off Legacy/CSM support in your system's BIOS and switch to UEFI support. That was causing occassional blank screen issues on my ASUS 27 inch monitor while using DisplayPort and I definitely wanted to use G-Sync. Also when that was previously enabled, I had weird issues with the BIOS screen not being the same resolution as the monitor's, which made things look weird while booting and looking through the BIOS settings. However, since your system is older, you may be stuck with leaving that setting alone and sticking with HDMI for a monitor connection. No G-Snyc however as Krom noted.

I'm currently thinking of going to a ASUS ROG Swift PG329Q 32” Gaming Monitor in 1440 and flat, although they offer a curved option. Even though I have a RTX 3080ti, my case fan setup really sucks and I don't want to fry the card trying to keep it cool running in 4K, although 4K is gorgeous in games. That's one of my projects, upgrade my case for better cooling. My current ASUS monitor is starting to have a weird issue of showing tiny white dust-like spots when it first boots after sitting for about a week. Those spots are very subtle and disappear after it warms up, but I'm sure it will eventually become an issue. There's also the new OLED monitors that are in the pipeline, but they are just not ready for prime time right now.
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