Front-Panel HDMI

Awakening · November 15, 2016

Is there an easy way to tell which GPUs have an HDMI header for cases like the S340 Elite that have front-panel HDMI? It doesn't seem to be advertised well or I'm using the wrong phrases to search for it.

I'm mostly concerned about this with the new Pascal cards.

Mira Yurizaki · November 15, 2016

EVGA had a specific "VR Edition" card, I'm not sure if anyone else did this. However it used an HDMI port. There has been no "HDMI header" other than the S/PDIF header for digital audio.

Oshino Shinobu · November 15, 2016

Most of them will have something like "VR Edition" in the title. The only companies I'm aware of are EVGA and Gigabyte.

Gigabyte GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming has multiple "VR Link" ports on the front of the card. Something that Gigabyte has done an outstanding job at not marketing it or explaining well. There's not even any pictures of the ports on the page for the card on their own damn site. The description for "VR Link" is:

"Xtreme VR Link provides the best solution for both VR device demand with 3 HDMI ports and 3x 4k monitors demand with 3 DP ports. Outputs are automatically detected when restarting PC.".

There's only one mention of them being front facing, and you have to scroll half way the way down the page to find it. It's almost even worse than Nvidia's documentation for what GSync does.

Awakening · November 15, 2016

21 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

EVGA had a specific "VR Edition" card, I'm not sure if anyone else did this. However it used an HDMI port. There has been no "HDMI header" other than the S/PDIF header for digital audio.

Oh. Maybe I got confused with that then. Thanks.

14 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Most of them will have something like "VR Edition" in the title. The only companies I'm aware of are EVGA and Gigabyte.

Gigabyte GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming has multiple "VR Link" ports on the front of the card. Something that Gigabyte has done an outstanding job at not marketing it or explaining well. There's not even any pictures of the ports on the page for the card on their own damn site. The description for "VR Link" is:

"Xtreme VR Link provides the best solution for both VR device demand with 3 HDMI ports and 3x 4k monitors demand with 3 DP ports. Outputs are automatically detected when restarting PC.".

There's only one mention of them being front facing, and you have to scroll half way the way down the page to find it. It's almost even worse than Nvidia's documentation for what GSync does.

Yep, that's definitely it. You're right about the bad marketing though. None of the images on PCPP, Newegg, or even their own site had pictures showing the front-facing HDMI ports. I had to search Google Images to find a picture of it. It's amazing how bad marketing teams can be sometimes.

It's too bad it's $700 when you can buy a different 1080 right now for $100+ less than that. That's definitely gonna drive people away from it. None of my monitors are HDMI and it has obvious red highlights so I'll most likely skip out on it.