I have one DVI-I Port,

Can I connect two monitors to it?

Is it best to get a wide-screen for this or a standard one?

Jon Diaz, , US (Armed Forces)

What an interesting question. (I don't know the answer but hopefully a reader will.)

Here are some facts to start with:

1. DVI-D is a digital port. DVI-I carries the digital signal but also carries a standard VGA (analog) port,
2. Most display cards or PCs that have a DVI port also have a VGA port. In this case you can normally connect a digital monitor to the DVI port and an analog monitor to the VGA port,. That is, the operating system will recognise that you have two, separate monitors. These can be a mixture of screen formats.

So if you want to connect two monitors to a single DVI-I port, what do you want to happen?

If you want to connect two digital monitors to the port then at best they would both show exactly the same screen, and the operating system would think it had only one monitor., (That is, the screen would be repeated, not extended.) However, you would need some way to connect two screens to the one output port, and this would need a special cable or splitter box (and these are available,) But why would you want to do it?

If you wanted to run two separate monitors (showing different screens) then I guess you would need a cable that split the digital from the analog signals and fed them to the two monitors. This would have the same effect as using the VGA and DVI outputs. I assume that this would work, but I'm only guessing.


Paul Zucker