Has anyone else experienced older monitors not working with newer computers?

mon0theist · February 7, 2023

This seems to be a pattern I've noticed across 3 different PCs so far, just curious if anyone else has seen this and has any ideas on what could be happening. It seems like when trying to run older monitors in a multi-monitor setup with new hardware, I frequently get blank black screens or sometimes even no signal.

A while back I tried to replace my GPU in my old PC, and had a weird issue where I couldn't get my secondary monitor (Dell P2213) to work with a 6600XT GPU, even after trying several GPU exchanges. However once I switched to an Nvidia card (3060), it worked just fine, so I wrote it off to being an issue with Powercolor GPUs.

But then recently I built a new PC, this time with a Sapphire 6750XT, and a similar thing happened. If I connected this Dell P2213 as a secondary monitor, it wouldn't work; but if I connected it by itself it would work fine. Borrowed a newer Dell monitor from work to test it out, and it worked fine, so it seemed like the issue was isolated to the older P2213 monitor.

I would think that maybe this is due to faulty AMD drivers or something, but then just recently I had a user at work that had a similar issue, but this time with Dell laptop, docking station, and monitors, and I think he's either running Intel integrated graphics or Nvidia, but definitely not AMD. But for whatever reason multi-monitor just stopped working until we swapped out one of the older Dell monitors for a newer one, and then it worked again.

So I'm not sure if this is a Dell issue, or if perhaps there is something about older monitors that are incompatible with newer hardware, at least in multi-monitor setups?

Just curious if anyone's had same or similar experiences and if there might be any theories as to what's happening

mariushm · February 7, 2023

Some video cards are more sensitive to timeouts, how fast monitors respond to various things, encryption, cable quality etc etc.

I remember there were some AMD video cards that had issues with some monitors when connected through DisplayPort, because those monitors took too long to respond to some commands or something issued through the cable. This caused monitors to not be detected at pc start up, causing black screens - but user could change to HDMI cable and get the same monitor working.

jaslion · February 7, 2023

Just now, mariushm said:

Some video cards are more sensitive to timeouts, how fast monitors respond to various things, encryption, cable quality etc etc.

I remember there were some AMD video cards that had issues with some monitors when connected through DisplayPort, because those monitors took too long to respond to some commands or something issued through the cable. This caused monitors to not be detected at pc start up, causing black screens - but user could change to HDMI cable and get the same monitor working.

Their monitor in particular also had issues with older gpu's back in the day (reviews mention this) most likelt due to the exact thing you are describing

mon0theist · February 7, 2023

7 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Some video cards are more sensitive to timeouts, how fast monitors respond to various things, encryption, cable quality etc etc.

I remember there were some AMD video cards that had issues with some monitors when connected through DisplayPort, because those monitors took too long to respond to some commands or something issued through the cable. This caused monitors to not be detected at pc start up, causing black screens - but user could change to HDMI cable and get the same monitor working.

Very interesting, did not know that, but now that you mention it I have seen some other troubleshooting situations at work where 2x DP wouldn't work but 1x DP 1x HDMI would