In late 2014, I bought two QNIX 2710 Evolution II monitors off eBay for my dekstop computer because I was jealous of a friend’s new dual-monitor setup. Three or so months later, I absolutely love it. My only regret is that my field of vision isn’t wide enough to use all 5120x1440 of this display real estate all at once. If having too much room is my biggest “complaint” then it must have worked out extremely well!
However, there’s very little open space on top of my desk now and I also frequently work from home. It’s resulted in me being pretty uncomfortable when I’m working from home, especially when I’m doing something productive. I wind up hunched over my work laptop pretty awkwardly, and depending on how long I do that it has some negative repercussions on my chiseled middle-aged computer geek physique. Against my better thoughts, I disassembled my cable management a bit and attempted to hook one of my monitors into my laptop’s DVI port. Unfortunately, the laptop’s video card is not capable of creating a signal that my monitor would recognize.
I did some further research on my work laptop’s video card, the nVidia NVS 5200M, and learned that the only way to run at the monitor’s native resolution was via the DisplayPort on the laptop. Each time I’ve purchased a QNIX monitor via someone in South Korea on eBay the listings have warned many things–including that adapters will not work with these monitors. On reading those listings, I assumed that the sellers didn’t want to deal with unhappy customers who purchased the monitor and the incorrect adapter and now their new QNIX 2710 monitor wouldn’t work. Although, considering what a bargain these monitors have been, I also worried that there was a likely chance that they just weren’t going to be compatible with the adapters.
All that being said, if I was going to be working from home regularly, I still needed some sort of solution. Working directly on my laptop was just atrocious for anything more than a few minutes. I did some Googling and mostly found people like the eBay vendors were worried about; all sorts of people using the wrong adapters, the wrong video cards, and it resulted in them having problems with their QNIX 2710 monitors not displaying anything. Based on what I’d read, I was both discouraged and encouraged. I decided to try and see what I could do to find the perfect adapter for the monitor.
Ultimately, I believed that if I found an active DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter which supported my resolution, that I would be golden. I wound up finding quite a few that said they’d do it, but after reading reviews of those products I’d become concerned. What I found most were that listings were missing whether or not it was active or that they were active but they didn’t list the maximum resolution. I’m sure there were probably one or two adapters that I skipped over that may have worked, but I didn’t want to take the chance on those.
After a little bit of searching, I found the goFanco DisplayPort to DVI Adapter (specs) which stated that it was active and that it’d support resolutions all the way up to 4k. After some more Googling and reading a few positive reviews, I was fairly confident that this was the correct adapter to try out. My only remaining concern was whether or not it’d work with one of my QNIX 2710 monitors. Because all of my cables are finally neat and organized I decided to also purchase a Dual link DVI-D cable to use when evaluating the adapter with my monitors.
The goFanco DisplayPort to DVI Adapter proved my assumptions correct. The eBay listings for the QNIX 2710 monitors discourage adapter use because they’re afraid people will buy the wrong adapters and it won’t work with their computers. I don’t blame them, international shipping can be a headache and would both be time consuming and potentially costly. Paying for return shipping because some knucklehead can’t buy the right adapter seems like a waste of money and effort. My suggestion to those eBay dealers? Offer to bundle a goFanco DisplayPort to DVI Adapter along with your monitors to people who want to use DisplayPort at a modest premium in price!
Next up? Finding a nice KVM switch that supports dual-link DVI up to (and past) the resolution and refresh rates that I’m currently running my dual QNIX 2710 monitors at. Does anybody have a good suggestion?