Cable or Adaptor?

[Karl The Gimp]

Ok, I want to hook up a 256MB Sapphire HD3450 to my 42" plasma using HDMI, but the only was is either to use a HDMI to DVI-D Male Cable or to use an DVI to HDMI Adaptor and use a HDMI cable or a DVI cable, which would be better? Also I didnt think you could send audio through DVI? But the card says that it does?

[Webby]

If you want to send the audio then you will need to convert to HDMI (should be a DVI to HDMI adapter in the box) The card will output audio through the DVI port and down the cable so I guess the answer to your question really is do you have either cable already? In terms of signal quality get the best cable you can (more important over longer distances).

Personally I would get a HDMI cable and use the supplied converter to be on the safe side in case they have some special connections in the supplied adapter for the audio.

[Blackmage]

Can a DVI port output audio?

[Webby]

Can a DVI port output audio?

On an ATi 3xxx series card yes

[Blackmage]

On an ATi 3xxx series card yes

interesting would you not need a special DVI cable for that?

[staffsMike]

interesting would you not need a special DVI cable for that?

A HDMI cable is required. I beleive you get an DVI to HDMI adapter with these cards. Then using an HDMI cable you can utilse sound and audio, assuming either your motherboard or sound card has the right header for this as the graphics card itself doesn't process the sound afaik.

[Karl The Gimp]

yeah I thought there would of been an DVI to HDMI adapter in the box but there isnt, I'm a bit cheesed off coz when you look in the scan website it says..
Chipset Features:
128-bit floating point High Dynamic-Range (HDR)
128-bit Studio-Precision Computation
AMD Xilleon HDTV Encoder
ATi 3Dc+
ATI Avivo
ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology
HDMI Output Support
Microsoft DirectX® 10.1
OpenGL 2.0
Shader Model 4.1

[Karl The Gimp]

been looking around the net, and it seem that to use the audio over DVI - HDMI you need the ATI DVI to HDMI adapter, Something about it uses different pins to a normal DVI to HDMI adapter/Cable.

[Agent]

In terms of signal quality get the best cable you can (more important over longer distances).

It's really not important when it comes to digital cables