"I wonder if there are more than a few cables from the video card to the display? Here I just have one HDMI cable albeit a lowly other ATI card and it's just fine."
Something of an annoyance and a curiosity for me.
Bought a Dell Studio Slim Desktop for use as a HTPC, and then I added a half-height ATI Radeon HD 4650 video card to it with native HDMI. Not some DVI adapter thing.
The video is routed through my receiver, which does HDMI passthrough and upscaling, though right now it's set not to do any upscaling. This then goes to my Dell UltraSharp 2709W with a native resolution of 1920x1200.
The problem is that I cannot seem to get Windows to consistently boot up displaying video on the HDMI input. I accept that I won't necessarily get the pre-POST display, and that's generally fine, I have a DVI cable connected for when I need to do that, and when I need to kick Windows in the butt a bit.
What I have found works, is if I switch my monitor to the DVI output, change the resolution to something like 1080p, and then back to 1920x1200, it will work just fine until I shut the computer off again.
At first I thought maybe it was my receiver, but I had a Dell Studio 17 laptop which at first exhibited similar issues until I had it replaced. At which point it worked flawlessly for the few days until I got this system to take its place.
Right now, I kind of suspect buggy ATI drivers. I have the latest Catalyst drivers as of maybe last Friday. I would have gone with an nVidia card, but all the decent ones require an external power source, and this being a slimline model, it has a FTX power supply which is difficult to find over 350W.
I have configured Windows so that the HDMI display is set to mirror the DVI display. I've created a profile for this, set a hotkey that does jack, and even created a shortcut that I stuck into the startup folder, which also did jack.
Really, all I want to do is be able to hit the power button, and have the Windows display pop up, and I can be on my way. If it takes until the ATI driver loads, that's fine. Anyone have any suggestions? It gets kind of annoying when I wake up in the night, can't get back to sleep, so I turn this on to watch a little TV to keep my ears from ringing, and then I'm forced to wake up enough to deal with switching inputs, then resolutions, then inputs again.
The system is running Vista x64 SP2, all other updates, and the latest ATI Catalyst drivers as of about a week ago. Am open to pretty much all suggestions.
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